With thrice seven-league boots one could stride from the coast of the United States and with a dozen steps reach British Guiana dry-shod. From an aviator's seat, the chain of West Indies, Windward and Leeward Islands curves gracefully southwards, like stepping-stones across a Japanese stream. If, corresponding to this annihilation of space, we could abbreviate minutes, hours and days as in a moving-picture film, we might have the edifying spectacle of our steamer's trip reduced to a succession of loops, ricochetting from island after island, as a stone skips along the surface of the water, sliding along those dotted lines which are so characteristic a feature of coasts in our school geographies, and coming to rest at last with a splash in the muddy current off the Georgetown stelling.

Our steamer is preferable to the seven-league trip, for we thereby omit the big, cumbersome West Indies. It is a curious fact that any land projecting above the surface of the water is interesting and exciting in inverse ratio to its size. The endless New Jersey shore moves one not at all, while the single volcanic cone of Nevis brings thrills and emotions; Cuba is wearisome as one steams slowly past headland after headland, while Sombrero—a veritable oceanic speck of dust—stimulates the imagination to the highest pitch. It seems as if our Ego enlarges as our immediate terrestrial cosmos diminishes. In studying the birds of the endless jungles of the South American continent my interest never flags, yet it never quite attains the nth power of enthusiasm which accompanies the thought of the possibility of locating every nest on St. Thomas. This love of small islands must savor of the joy of possible completeness in achievement, plus a king's sensations, plus some of those of Adam!

Any guide book will give the area, population, amusements, best hotels (or the least objectionable ones), summary of history and the more important exports. But no one has ever attempted to tell of the soul of these islands—or even of the individuality of each, which is very real and very distinct. Some day this will be done, and the telling will be very wonderful, and will use up most of the superlatives in our language. For my part I may only search my memory for some little unimportant scene which lives again when the name of the island is spoken—and string these at random on pages, like the chains of little scarlet and black sea-beans which glisten in the fingers of the negresses, held up in hope of sale from their leaky boats, rocking on the liquid emerald around the steamer.

St. Thomas, or How I Was Taught to Catch Lizards by a Danish Flapper.—Nearly a week had passed since we began to exchange a sleety winter for the velvety tropics, to traverse the latitude spectrum of ocean from drab-gray to living turquoise. As on every trip, it was early morning when the long undulating profile of St. Thomas reared itself lazily from the sea, and almost at once, flocks of great-winged booby-gannets began to wheel and veer around the ship, banking in a way to make an aviator's blood leap.

From a dusky monochrome the land resolved into shades, and slowly into colors—gray volcanic rocks, dry yellow turf and green patches of trees. Then contours became traceable, smooth rounded shoulders of hills frayed out into jagged strata, with the close-shaven fur of bushes and shrubs, and occasional tall slender palms reminding one of single hydroids on the sargasso fronds. A thread of smoke drifting free from a palm grove was the first sign of life, and after a few minutes of twisting and turning, the steamer nosed out her circuitous channel, and from the very heart of the island the great crater harbor opened before us.

The beautiful hills rolled up and upward, and to their feet Charlotte Amalie, crowned with Bluebeard's castle, clung obliquely, her streets climbing with astonishing steepness. The little town was newly roofed, all the picturesque old red ones having been ripped off in the last hurricane. The houses were as flat, quite as like cardboard theatrical scenery as ever.

At the sight of a distant flag I endeavored to thrill patriotically at the thought that this island was now a part of the United States. I would have been more successful, however, if I could have recalled the vision of some fellow countryman in far distant time, landing on these slopes and taking possession by right of discovery. Even if some burly, semi-piratical American adventurer had annexed it for his president by feat of arms, my blood would have flowed less calmly than it did at the thought of so many millions of dollars paid as droit de possession. However, a tropic bird flew past and put the lesser matter out of mind.

As always, near the wharf thrived the same little open bar-room, with its floral-bedecked mirrors, selling good beer and vile soda. Aside from a flag here and there, the only sign of the change of nationality was several motorcycles with side cars which American soldiers drove like Jehu through the narrow streets, hustling natives and their tiny carts and ponies to one side, and leaving enduring trains of gasoline-scented dust. A few minutes' walk up one of the steep streets and all was quiet and unhurried, and the sense of a yet undigested possession, of embarrassing novelty of purchase, slipped aside and we knew that St. Thomas was still the unspoiled little island which the slow mellowing growth of West Indian evolution had made it. We climbed slowly up the steep road toward Mafolie, and behind us the glory of this wonderful island unfolded and spread, the roofs of the town shifting into strange geometric figures, and the harbor circle widening. We passed pleasant sunburned Danes and negroes driving tiny burros laden with small fagots and with grass. At one turn a tamarind tree was in full blossom, and here were gathered all the hummingbirds and butterflies of the island, or so it seemed. At last we reached a ravine, dry as everything else at this season on the island, and walked slowly up it, catching butterflies. They were in great numbers and gayly colored. The strangest sight was hundreds of large, brown millipedes clinging to the stems of bushes and small trees, apparently finding more moisture in the steady tradewinds than in the soil, which even under large stones, was parched and dry: dragonflies were abundant, but the dominant forms of insect life were butterflies and spiders.

The road wound over the top of the ridge and from its summit we looked down on the other half of the island. No house or trace of cultivation was visible and the beauty of the view was beyond adequate description. Rolling, comfortably undulating hills were below us, and in front a taller, rounded one like the head of some wearied tropical giant. Beyond this, a long curved arm of richest green had been stretched carelessly out into the sea, inclosing a bay, which from our height, looked like a small pool, but such a pool as would grace a Dunsany tale. It was limpid, its surface like glass and of the most exquisite turquoise. Its inner rim was of pure white sand, a winding line bounding turquoise water and the rich, dark green of the sloping land in a flattened figure three. I never knew before that turquoise had a hundred tints and shades, but here the film nearest the sand was unbelievably pale and translucent, then a deeper sheen overlaid the surface, while the center of the pool was shaded with the indescribable pigment of sheer depth. In a great frame of shifting emerald and cobalt, set a shining blue wing of a morpho butterfly and you can visualize this wonder scene.

Outside the encircling green arm, the water of ocean glowed ultramarine in the slanting sunlight, and stretched on and on to the curving horizon of Atlantis. The scene seemed the essence of peace, and to the casual glance hardly a cloud moved. I sat for a long time and let every part of my retina absorb the glory of colors. Soon motion and life became apparent. Shadows shifted softly across the surface, bringing hues of delicate purplish blue, memory tints of open ocean, and against these darkened tones a thousand specks of white glowed and inter-weaved like a maze of motes in a shaft of sunlight. In imagination we could enlarge them to a swarm of silvery bees, and then my glasses resolved them into gannets—great sea birds with wings six feet from tip to tip—an astounding hint of the actual distance and depth below me of this pool-like bay. An hour later the sunlight left the turquoise surface, and its blueness darkened and strengthened and became opaque, although it was a long time before sunset, and the ocean beyond kept all its brilliance.

My eye was drawn to two tiny dots on the sandy rim. I could just make out that they were moving and guessed them to be dogs or chickens. The glasses made magic again and split up each group into a triumvirate of little burros which trotted along, and presently turned into an invisible side trail. Perhaps the most fascinating discovery of motion was that of the water's edge. To the eye there were neither waves nor ripples, but careful scrutiny through the strong prisms showed a rhythmical approach and receding, a gentle breathlike pulsation which regularly darkened and uncovered a thread of sand. I forgot the busy little town on the other side of the island, the commerce and coaling and the distant echo of war, and giving a last look at the tarnished turquoise pool, the resentment of financial acquisition of such beauty softened, and I felt glad that I had indirectly some small tithe of ownership, as well as the complete memory monopoly of the glories of this passing day.

As I made my way down the ravine, the fascinating island lizards scrambled about or watched me knowingly from rock or tree-trunk. As usual I wrecked my net in striving to sweep them into it, and bruised my fingers in vain efforts to seize their slender forms. Rarely I succeeded; usually I found but a bit of tail in my fingers, or a handful of loose bark, while, just out of reach, they would halt and look me over derisively with their bright intelligent eyes. At the roadside I came suddenly upon a little Danish girl of about twelve years, dancing excitedly with a lizard dangling from the end of a slender grass stem.

Her blue eyes flashed with excitement, her yellow pigtail flew wildly about as she danced and backed away, fearful of touching the little lizard, and yet too fascinated to drop it and allow it to escape. I took it up and found it had been captured with a neat slip noose. She said it was easy to catch them and showed me how, and before I reached the wharf I had a dozen of the interesting little chaps stored in various pockets. Thus after years of effort a little Danish school girl solved my problem for me. Acting on this hint I tried fine hair wire, but nothing proved as effective as the thin, pliant but strong stems of grass.

It is surprising how difficult it is to touch these little reptiles and yet how easy to noose them. At the approach of hand or net they are off faster than the eye can follow, yet they are merely interested in the waving grass. Even when by an awkward motion one flicks their nose, they merely shake their heads or shift a step or two. They detect no connection between the moving grass and the more distant hand that wields it.

Bound to the ground by their short scales and four limbs, these small lizards are yet remarkably birdlike in their vivacity and their enthusiastic playing of their little game of life. Every motion is registered by quick wrenlike movements and by the changing play of colors over their scales, while when particularly excited, they puff out a comical dewlap of yellow and orange skin beneath their throat. Thanks to my flapper acquaintance I am now on more equal terms with the little scaly people of the islands, and can study their puzzling color problems at close range.

Looking back at Bluebeard's and Blackbeard's castles from the deck of our vessel as we slowly steamed from the harbor, some one asked when the last pirate plied his trade. I looked ashore at the fort and guns, I listened to the warning bugle, I watched the scattered lights vanish, leaving all of the town in darkness, I saw our own darkened portholes and shaded lights. As my mind went to the submarines which inspired all these precautions, as I recalled the sinister swirl in the Atlantic which had threatened us more than once on my return from the battle-front, I could answer truly that Bluebeard and his ilk were worthily represented at the present day. Indeed, of the two enemies, I found much more to condone in the ignorance and the frank primitive brutality of the pirate of past centuries, than in the prostituted science and camouflaged kultur of the teutonic ishmaelite of today.

St. Kitts, a Plunge, Exploration and Monkeys.—I came on deck at daybreak and found the sea like a mirror. Even the clouds were undisturbed, resting quietly in the mountain valleys of St. Eustatius, and on the upper slopes of St. Kitts in the distance. The tropical morning was a lazy one, and the engines seemed to throb in a half-somnolent manner. I folded up into a deck chair and idly watched the beautiful profile of the island astern.

Suddenly the sea became alive with virile beings—curving steel-gray bodies which shot forth like torpedoes from some mighty battery. I thrilled in every fiber and the sloth of the tropics fell from me as if by a galvanic shock: the dolphins had come! Usually they appear in their haunts between Dominica and Martinique or off the latter island, but here they were in dozens, leaping for breath with the regularity of machinery. Now and then the spirit of play would possess one and he vaulted high in air, ten feet above the surface, twisted and fell broadside with a slap which could be heard a half-mile away. Then several simultaneously did the same thing. A school would come close alongside, slacken speed to that of the vessel, and now and then dive beneath and appear off the opposite quarter. Another trick was for one or two to station themselves just ahead of the bow and remain motionless, urged on by the pressure of the water from behind. It was very unexpected and very splendid to have this battalion of magnificent cetaceans, bursting with vital energy and fullness of life, injected without warning into the calm quiet of this tropical sea.

We anchored off Basseterre and waited in vain for the doctor. There seemed no chance of landing for some time, so several of us dived off and swam about the ship for an hour. The joy of this tropical water is something which can be communicated only by experience. It was so transparent that in diving one hardly knew the moment he would enter it. Paddling along just beneath the surface, there was a constant temptation to reach down and grasp the waving seaferns and bits of coral which seemed only just out of reach, whereas they were a good thirty feet beneath. Whether floating idly or barging clumsily along in the only fashion possible to us terrestrial humans, we longed for the sinuous power of the dolphins, whose easy sculling imparts such astounding impetus. Now and then we saw a deep swimming fish, but the line of envious fellow voyagers along the ship's rail were denied all this joy by reason of their fear of sharks. They had read in many books and they had listened to many tales, and they do not know what we shared with the little nigger boys who dive for pennies—the knowledge that the chance of an attack from a shark is about equal to that of having your ears sewed up by devil's darning needles. Over all the world I have swum among sharks; from Ceylon to the Spanish Main I have talked intimately with scores of native captains and sailors and learned the difference between what they tell to the credulous tourist and what they believe in their hearts.

In time the St. Kitts doctor arrived, and, as he rowed past, looked at us critically as if he suspected us of infecting the waters of the sea with some of those mysteriously terrible diseases which he is always hoping for on the ship's papers, but never seems to find.

Walking hastily through the town, we reached the first of the great sugar-cane fields, and skirting these diagonally came ever nearer the sloping base of the high land. Ravines are always interesting for they cannot be cultivated, and it was up one of these lava and water-worn gullies that we began to climb Monkey Hill. We went slowly, for there were many absorbing things on the way. Palm swifts swooped about, while noisy kingbirds gleaned as industriously but with shorter flights. Heavy-billed anis whaleeped and fluttered clumsily ahead of us; honey creepers squeaked and small black finches watched us anxiously. From a marshy pool half a dozen migrating sandpipers flew up and circled down to the shore. Every shrubby field was alive with butterflies of many kinds and the vigorous shaking of each bush yielded excellent harvests of strange insects which fell into the open umbrella held beneath. In a grove of wild mango and acacias were hosts of green filigree butterflies, dropping and swirling from the foliage like falling leaves, the comparison being heightened by the brown spots, like fungus blotches, which were etched upon their wings.

Leaving the ravine we climbed over great lateral shoulders of the mountain, grassy slopes with bold outjutting rocks, and rarely a clump of small shrubs, bringing to mind the lower foothills of Garhwal and Kashmir. Higher still came dense shrubby growths, much of it thorny, seamed by our narrow trail, and threaded here and there by glowing fronds of golden shower orchids. Ground doves perched on low branches and an occasional big pigeon whistled past. From the summit a wonderful view stretched out—the long, sloping green cane-fields, the clustered roofs, and beyond the curving beaches, the blue water with our vessel resting at anchor. Now came a search for monkeys, regardless of thorns and rough stones, for, strange though it sounds, St. Kitts possesses many of these animals. Whatever the accident of their arrival, they are firmly established and work much havoc in the small hours, among gardens and sugar-cane. Our efforts were in vain. We heard the scolding chatter of one of the small simians, and were preparing to surround him, when a warning blast from the ship summoned us and we packed up our collection of insects and flowers, munched our last piece of chocolate and began to clamber down the great sun-drenched slopes.

Martinique, or a New Use for an Eight of Hearts.—Columbus thought that this island was inhabited only by women, and to this day the market place bears out the idea. It is a place apart from all the rest of the city. In early morning, before the gaudy shutters were taken down, the streets were quiet—the callous soles of the passersby made the merest velvet shuffling and only an occasional cry of the vendor of some strange fruit or cakes broke the stillness. When yet half a block away from the market one became aurally aware of it. The air was filled with a subdued hum, an indefinite murmur which might as well be the sound of tumbling waters as of human voices. It was a communal tongue, lacking individual words, accent and grammar, and yet containing the essence of a hundred little arguments, soliloquies, pleadings, offers and refusals. After the aural came the olfactory zone, and none may describe this, so intermingled that fish and vegetables, spice and onions were only to be detected when one approached their respective booths.

The details of market life hold the possibilities of epic description; the transactions of a stock exchange pale into mediocrity when compared with the noise and excitement when a sixpence changes hands between Martinique negresses.

All the sales in the market were of the smallest quantities; little silver was seen, pennies, ha'pennies and sous composing all the piles of coppers. The colors of the fruits were like flowers, melons white with a delicate fretwork of green; brilliant touches of red peppers like scarlet passion flowers; tiny bits of garlic lilac-tinted. The fish had the hues of sunsets on their scales, and the most beautiful, the angelfish, were three for a penny, while the uglier, more edible ones, were sixpence each. Beauty was rated at inverse value here.

Around and around the iron fence which bounded the market place, paced a pitiful pair—a tiny black mite who could not have passed three summers, leading by the hem of an ample black skirt an old blind woman. After several halting steps they would hesitate and the gaunt hand would be thrust through the bars begging for market refuse. Once the gods were kind and a bit of melon and a spotted mango were given, but more often alms was asked of an empty stall, or within sight only of a tethered duck or chicken. Some of the gifts were no better than the garbage over which the pair stepped.

We sat in chairs in a tiny pharmacist shop—the artist and I—and were at once the center of a chattering, staring throng, a kaleidoscope of shifting colors. We shoved and dismissed to no avail, then the owner of the shop with a gentle "permitte-moi" threw a pailful of "not-too-clean" water over the crowd, including the artist and myself. The mob scattered shrieking and for a short time the surrounding space was open. Soon a larger crowd gathered, with the still dripping units of the first assemblage smiling expectantly in the offing, hovering at a safe distance. The second dispersal had a legal origin; the market policeman stole quietly along the wall of the shop and hurled himself like a catapult, butting goatlike into the heart of the crowd. A half-dozen fat negresses toppled over, and cassava, tin cups and stray fishes flew about. Even those who lost all their purchases showed no resentment but only a roaring appreciation of the joke. In this rush we were almost upset with the crowd, and we began to look forward with dread to any more strenuous defense of our comfort.

The little French mulatto pharmacist who was responsible for the occasional joyful outbursts of eau, seemed to profit by our presence, for a number of interested onlookers who had pushed into the shop to watch us from behind, when cornered and hailed by the irate owner, stammeringly asked for some small thing, by the purchase of which they bought their liberty. The regular business of this little shop alone was worthy one's whole attention. A prescription was being pounded up in a mortar and when the clerk reached out for a scoop and for something to scrape the sides clean, an eight of hearts was the nearest and with this the chemicals were mixed. Within the next fifteen minutes eight or ten different prescriptions, powders and crystals were measured, shaken, mixed and scraped by the same eight of hearts, and the combination of ingredients which the last purchaser obtained must surely have had some radical effect on his system—salubrious or otherwise.

Then came the unusual one—the super person who is always to be discovered sooner or later. Externally she was indistinguishable from the host of her sisters. She was garbed in a wrapper, flowing and reaching the ground, purple, and pocked with large white spots. A diminutive turban of yellow and red madras was surmounted by an ancient and crownless straw hat, but at the first word she was revealed. A British subject, she was here at the eruption fifteen years ago. That day she and one of her daughters happened to be far away from St. Pierre. When the explosion came, she was outside the danger zone, but her husband, son and other daughter were burned to death. She regretted the impoliteness of the French here and apologized for them for crowding us. Later she brought a gift of rose bananas to Mary Hammond, saying that Americans had given her food and clothes when she lost everything.

The crowd was curious, thoughtless, selfish, with the dominant hope of a laugh at some one's expense. Here was one who sought us out, who left unguarded her little tray of bananas and garlic to speak a word of thanks, to present a handful of fruit which in her station was a munificent gift, and who was satisfied and grateful with our sincere appreciation. She has sisters in graciousness over all the world, but they are rare and widely scattered, like the Akawai Indian squaw who gave me her last cassava, like the wrinkled Japanese crone who persuaded her son to become one of my best servants, like the wife of the headman of an isolated village in Yunnan, who from among her sodden, beastlike neighbors came forth and offered fowls and vegetables with a courteous spirit worthy of any station in life.

St. Lucia, a Study in Contrasts.—Each time I have visited Castries it has seemed more somber and less pleasant. It is colorless because it is full of coal and no change of weather brings amelioration. When the sun fills the air with a blinding glare and palpitating heat waves (as it occasionally does), each step raises a cloud of coal dust, and when the tropical rain falls in a steady downpour (as it usually does), the whole world seems covered with coal mud, as if about to dissolve into some carboniferous slime.

This is an important military and coaling station, which perhaps explains much. Military exigency compelled me to procure a special pass from the Chief of Police to paddle about its dreary streets, and which strictly forbade my climbing the comparatively clean and attractive mountains beyond these streets. As a coaling station I am sure of its success and popularity, for the coal carriers who comprise most of the natives, have apparently no time to wash between steamers. So intensive was the grime that the original dark hue of their skins offered no camouflage to the anthracite palimpsest which overlaid it. Such huge negro women, such muscles, such sense of power, I had never before sensed. I should dislike, were I an official of St. Lucia, to take any decided stand on an anti-feminine platform. So saturated are the people in coal, such is their lack of proper perspective of this material, they seem actually to be unconscious of its presence. Returning on board, one passes the Seaview Hotel, about which coal is piled to a much greater height than the roof. Such abstraction is worthy of mention at least.

Amid the memory of all the dirt and damp, dull sadness, two things were unforgetable, as untouched diamonds glisten in their matrix of wet blue clay. Amid sodden clothes, unwashed hands and bestial faces, a trayful of rainbow fishes gleamed opalwise—coral, parrot and angelfish, all awaiting some unsavory purchaser. Then came the little French negress, selling fans, out of the ruck of sexless bearers of coal. When we answered her appeal with a "Non merci," her face lighted up at the courtesy of the words; "Voyons!" said she, "comme c'est gracieusement refusÉ!" No mortal could have resisted buying her wares after such delicate sentiment.

About five in the afternoon we parted from the gritty wharf and steamed for hour after hour along the shore. We forgot the poor, filthy, ill-mannered coal carriers, and the thought of the misery and squalor of the town passed with its vanishing, still clad in its cloak of rain. As the natives appeared to us so inferior to those of the other islands, so by some law of compensation the coast was revealed correspondingly beautiful. At four bells the sun sank on the side away from the island, in a blaze of yellow and orange with one particular cloud touching the water line with flame color, as if a mighty distant volcano had just reared its head above the sea, still in the throes of molten erection. On the opposite side were passing the dark green headlands and fiords of the land, while upward, high into the sky, there arose now and then some tremendous cloud, on fire with rich rose or salmon afterglow, or a maze of other tints defying human name or pigment. In front was the living blue water dulled by the dimming light and above all the transparent blue of the tropic sky.

Without warning, from out of the soft folded edges of one of the filmy clouds, crept a curved edge of cold steel, like some strange kind of floating shell coming forth from its cloud of smoke, and a moment later the full moon was revealed, unlike any other color note in this marvelous scene. The icy, unchanging moon craters, the more plastic island mountains fringed by the wind-shapen trees, the still more shifting waters and the evanescent cloud mist, all were played upon and saturated and stained by colors which were beyond words, almost beyond our appreciation. Tiny villages, fronted by canoes and swathed in feathery cocoanut fronds, snuggled at the foot of great volcanic and coral cliffs.

But the crowning glory was reserved for the last, when we surged past the Trois Pitons, rearing their majestic heads above all the island, hundreds and hundreds of feet into the sky. Even the moon could not top one, and after cutting into sharp, silver silhouette every leaf and branch of a moon-wide swath of trees, it buried itself behind the peak and framed the whole mountain.

A small wandering rain storm drifted against the tallest piton and split in two, one half going away down the coast and the rest passing close enough to us to shower the decks with drops. As it fell astern, it spread out fanwise and in its heart developed a ghostly lunar rainbow—the spectrum cleansed and denuded of all the garish colors of day. At first we could only sense which was the warm, which the cold side of the bow, then it strengthened and the red appeared as dull copper or amber buff, and the violet as a deeper, colder blue, cloud hue. All the time, even when the rain was falling heaviest, the moon shone with full strength, and when at last we veered away from this wonder island, it was so high that there was no moonpath on the water, but only a living, shifting patch of a million electric wires, which wrote untold myriad messages in lunar script upon the little waves. From one fraction of time to another, the eye could detect and hold in memory innumerable strange figures, and the resemblance, if it be not sacrilege to make any simile, was only to script of languages long, long dead—the cuneiform of Babylon and the tendril spirals of Pali.

Once a faint light appeared upon the distant shore. Our steamer spoke in a short, sharp blast which thrilled us with its unexpectedness and the signal among the palms was quenched. From the great things of the cosmos, from brilliant Venus, and from the north star low in the sky, from the new splendor of Formalhaut, rising ever higher in the south, our thoughts were forced back to the littlenesses of the world war, whose faint influence reached even thus far to break the thread of our abstraction.

Barbados, in Eclipse and in Sun.—The vagaries of a naturalist are the delight of the uninitiated, and impress simple natives more than immoderate tips or the routine excesses of tourist folk. One's scientific eccentricities may even establish a small measure of fame, or rather notoriety. So it was that as I walked up the landing stage at Bridgetown, a small ebon personality pointed finger at me and confided to his neighbor, "See de mon—de tall mon da—he de mon who chase tree lizards in de cemetry!"

"Yes, George," I said, "I'm de mon who chased them with you two years ago, but this time we shall catch them as well."

"Anyting you say true, Boss, I'se yo boy."

But as is always true in sport, certainty robs it of the finest element of excitement, and our successful stalks that afternoon with grass stem nooses were less memorable than the frantic tree circlings and grave hurdlings of two years before.

On our return from the cemetery a breeze swept up from the sea, the palm fronds slithered against one another, and I suddenly caught myself shivering. The moment I became conscious of this I thought of fever and wondered if my life-long immunity had come to an end. Then I observed old hags wrapping themselves up; my eyes suddenly readjusted, I perceived that the glaring sunlight was tempered; again the strange mid-day breeze arose and finally I realized that I was witnessing an eclipse of the sun on the island of Barbados. The natives and the birds and even the patient little donkeys grew restless, the light became weaker and strange, and until the end of the eclipse we could think of nothing else. The most remarkable part to me, were the reflections. Looking however hastily and obliquely at the sun, I perceived nothing but a blinding glare, but walking beneath the shade of dense tropical foliage, the hosts of specks of sunlight sifting through, reflected on the white limestone, were in reality thousands of tiny representations of the sun's disk incised with the segment of the silhouetted moon, but reversed, just like the image through the aperture of a pinhole camera. I suppose it is a very common physical phenomenon, but to me it was a surprising thing to trace the curve of the eclipse clearly and with ease in the sunbeams on the pavement beneath my feet, while my retinas refused to face or register the original.

Barbados is very flat, thoroughly cultivated and said to be the most densely populated bit of land in the world; all of which guide-book gossip was discouraging to a naturalist. But besides the cemetery which was sanctuary for the jolly little lizards, I found a bit of unspoilt beach, with sand as white and fine as talcum powder, where dwelt undisturbed many assemblages of small folk. There were land-crabs which had come to have at heart more affection for the vegetable gardens at the beach top than for the waters of their forefathers. They had degenerated into mere commuters from their holes to the nearest melon patch. The lower part of the beach was that ever changing zone—that altar upon which each tide deposited some offering from the depths of the sea. This will some day have a worthy interpreter, a sympathetic recorder and commentator who will make a marvelous volume of this intermittent thread of the earth's surface, pulsing, changing—now showing as water, now as land—but always vital with exciting happenings.

I sat for an hour on the upper beach and watched the little native folk, autochthones who for innumerable generations had been so loyal to their arenaceous home that the sheltering mantle of its pale hue had fallen upon their wings and bodies. Here were tiny, grayish-white crabs, here were spiders, which, until they moved, were not spiders but sand. And when they did move, recognition usually came too late to some fly, which had trespassed on this littoral hunting ground. Tiger-beetles drifted about like sand-grain wraiths, whose life wanderings lay between low tide and the highest dune; veriest ghosts of their brilliant green brethren farther inland. Ashen wasps buzzed past, with compass and maps in their heads, enabling them to circle about once or twice, alight, take a step or two and, kicking down their diminutive front door, to enter the slanting sandy tube which for them fulfilled all the requirements of home.

From an aeroplane, Barbados would appear like a circular expanse of patchwork, or a wild futurist painting set in deepest ultramarine; a maze of rectangles or squares of sugar-cane, with a scattering of sweet potatoes and sea island cotton. I got a hint of this when I motored to the highest point of land, and then climbed the steeple of the loftiest church. At my feet was the Atlantic with great breakers, reduced by distance to tiny wavelets twinkling among the black boulders and feathery palms which were scattered along shore. For more than two hundred and seventy-five years the church had stood here, and not to be outdone by the strangeness of the little beach people, the graveyard boasted the remains of a descendant of a Greek Emperor, who long ago had been warden.

But again our steamer summoned us and we left the dusky natives with their weird legends and the tiny island which they love, and were rowed steadily out beyond the two miles of shallow coast.

When we steamed away from shore that night, no lights except those of the dining saloon were allowed. Yet the path of the vessel made a mockery of this concealment. The world did not exist a hundred feet away from the ship and yet there was no mist or fog. The outward curve of the water from the bow was a long slender scimitar of phosphorescence, and from its cutting edge and tip flashed bits of flame and brilliant steely sparks, apparently suspended above the jet-black water. Alongside was a steady ribbon of dull green luminescence, while, rolling and drifting along through this path of light came now and then great balls of clear, pure fire touched with emerald flames, some huge jelly or fish, or sargasso weed incrusted with noctiluca. Everywhere throughout the narrow zone of visibility were flickering constellations, suns and planets of momentary life, dying within the second in which they flashed into sight. Once Orion left a distinct memory on the retina—instantly to vanish forever. Perhaps to some unimaginably distant and unknown god, our world system may appear as fleeting. To my eyes it seemed as if I looked at the reflections of constellations which no longer swung across the heavens—shadows of shadows.

Then four bells struck—silveryly—and I knew that time still existed.