My Father, by an indulgent act for the caprice of which I cannot wholly account, presently let in a flood of imaginative light which was certainly hostile to my heavenly calling.  My instinctive interest in geography has already been mentioned.  This was the one branch of knowledge in which I needed no instruction, geographical information seeming to soak into the cells of my brain without an effort.  At the age of eleven, I knew a great deal more of maps, and of the mutual relation of localities all over the globe, than most grown-up people do.  It was almost a mechanical acquirement.  I was now greatly taken with the geography of the West Indies, of every part of which I had made MS. maps.  There was something powerfully attractive to my fancy in the great chain of the Antilles, lying on the sea like an open bracelet, with its big jewels and little jewels strung on an invisible thread.  I liked to shut my eyes and see it all, in a mental panorama, stretched from Cape Sant’ Antonio to the Serpent’s Mouth.  Several of these lovely islands, these emeralds and amethysts set on the Caribbean Sea, my Father had known well in his youth, and I was importunate in questioning him about them.  One day, as I multiplied inquiries, he rose in his impetuous way, and climbing to the top of a bookcase, brought down a thick volume and presented it to me.  ’You’ll find all about the Antilles there,’ he said, and left me with Tom Cringle’s Log in my possession.

The embargo laid upon every species of fiction by my Mother’s powerful scruple had never been raised, although she had been dead four years.  As I have said in an earlier chapter, this was a point on which I believe that my Father had never entirely agreed with her.  He had, however, yielded to her prejudice; and no work of romance, no fictitious story, had ever come in my way.  It is remarkable that among our books, which amounted to many hundreds, I had never discovered a single work of fiction until my Father himself revealed the existence of Michael Scott’s wild masterpiece.  So little did I understand what was allowable in the way of literary invention that I began the story without a doubt that it was true, and I think it was my Father himself who, in answer to an inquiry, explained to me that it was ‘all made up’.  He advised me to read the descriptions of the sea, and of the mountains of Jamaica, and ‘skip’ the pages which gave imaginary adventures and conversations.  But I did not take his counsel; these latter were the flower of the book to me.  I had never read, never dreamed of anything like them, and they filled my whole horizon with glory and with joy.

I suppose that when my Father was a younger man, and less pietistic, he had read Tom Cringle’s Log with pleasure, because it recalled familiar scenes to him.  Much was explained by the fact that the frontispiece of this edition was a delicate line-engraving of Blewfields, the great lonely house in a garden of Jamaican all-spice where for eighteen months he had worked as a naturalist.  He could not look at this print without recalling exquisite memories and airs that blew from a terrestrial paradise.  But Michael Scott’s noisy amorous novel of adventure was an extraordinary book to put in the hands of a child who had never been allowed to glance at the mildest and most febrifugal story-book.