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Alexander rode back to Christianstadt two days later, and again and again he drew a hard breath and closed his eyes.  It was a sight to move any man, and the susceptible and tender nature of young Hamilton bled for the tragedy of St. Croix.  There was not a landmark, not a cane-field, to remind him that it was the beautiful Island on which he had spent the most of his remembering years.  Although all of the Great Houses were standing, their mien and manner were so altered by the disappearance of their trees and outbuildings, and by the surrounding pulpy flats in place of the rippling acres of young cane, that they were unrecognizable.  Here and there were masses of debris, walls and thatched roofs swept far from the village foundations; but as a rule there was but a board here or a bunch of dried leaves there, a battered utensil or a stool, to reward the wretched Africans who wandered about searching for the few things they had possessed before the storm.  They looked hopeless and dull, as if their faculties had been stunned by the prolonged incessant noise of the hurricane.

Alexander was riding down what a week ago had been the most celebrated avenue in the Antilles.  Where there were trees at all, they were headless, the long gray twisted trunks as repulsive as they had once been beautiful The road was littered with many of the fallen; but others were far away in what had been the cane-fields, serpents and lizards sunning themselves on the dead roots.  Even stone walls were down, and under them, sometimes, were men.  Mills were in ruins; for no one had remained to keep bars in their staples.  Tanks of last year’s rum and treacle had been flung through the walls, and their odours mingled with the stench of decomposing men and cattle.  The horrid rattle of the land-crab was almost the only sound in that desolate land.  “The Garden of the Antilles” looked like a putrid swamp, and she had not a beauty on her.

Alexander turned at a cross-road into a path which led through the Grange estate to the private burying-ground of the Lyttons.  These few moments taxed his courage more heavily than the ride with the hurricane had done, and more than once he opened his clenched teeth and half turned his horse’s head.  But he went on, and before long he had climbed to the end of his journey.  The west wall of the little cemetery had been blown out, and the roof of old James Lytton’s tomb lay with its debris.  A tree, which evidently had been torn from the earth and flung from a distance, lay half in and half out of the enclosure.  But his mother’s headstone, which stood against the north wall, was undisturbed, although the mound above her was flat and sodden.  The earth had been strong enough to hold her.  Alexander remembered its awful air of finality as it opened to receive her, then closed over her.  What he had feared was that the burying-ground, which stood on the crest of a hill, would have been uprooted and scattered over the cane-fields.