I had, as I have said, made up my mind to start on the homeward trip early the following morning, but something happened that very evening to change my plans.  I had dropped into the little settlement’s one store, to buy some tobacco, the only kind that Charlie Webster—­who carried his British loyalty into the smallest concerns of life, declared fit to smoke—­some English plug of uncommon strength, not to say ferocity, a real manly tobacco such as one might imagine the favourite chew of pirates and smugglers.

I stayed chatting with the storekeeper—­a lean, astute-looking Englishman, with the un-English name of Sweeney—­who made a pretty good thing of selling his motley merchandise to the poor natives, on the good old business principle of supplying goods of the poorest possible quality at the highest possible prices.  He was said to hold a mortgage on the lives of half the population, by letting them have goods on credit against their prospective wages from sponging trips, he himself being the owner of three or four sponging sloops, and so doubly insured against loss.  His low-ceilinged, black-beamed store, dimly lit with kerosene lamps, was a wilderness of the most unattractive merchandise the mind of man can conceive, lying in heaps on trestles, hanging from the rafters, and cluttering up every available inch of space, so that narrow lanes only were left among dangling tinware, coils of rope, coarse bedding, barrels in which very unappetising pork lay steeping in brine, other barrels overflowing with grimy looking “grits” and sailors’ biscuits, drums of kerosene and turpentine, cans of paint, jostling clusters of bananas, strings of onions, dried fish, canned meats, loaves of coarse bread, tea and coffee, and other simple groceries.

Two rough planks laid on barrels made the counter, up to which from time to time rather worn-looking, spiritless negro women and girls would come to make their purchases, and then shuffle off again in their listless way.  Once in a while a sturdy negro would drop in for tobacco, with a more independent, well-fed air.  The Englishman served them all with a certain contemptuous indifference in which one somehow felt the presence of the whip-hand.

While he was thus attending a little group of such customers, I had wandered toward the back of the store, curiously examining the thousand and one commodities which supplied the strange needs of humanity here in this lost corner of the world; and, thus occupied, I was diverted by a voice like sudden music, a voice oddly rich and laughing and confident for such grim and sinister surroundings.  It was one, too, which I seemed to have heard before, and not so very long ago.  When I turned in its direction, I was immediately arrested, as one always is by any splendour of vitality; for a startling contrast indeed—­to the spiritless, furtive figures that had been coming and going hitherto—­was this superb young creature, tall and lithe with proudly