Afterward, surrounded by the fragments of that indomitable tea-party, we sat and watched the light go out of the world. I have read, and I have heard it told, that there is no real twilight in the tropics. And yet I seem to remember a long hour of dusk that evening, an hour in which the street beneath us filled slowly to its iron eaves with the crepuscular mysteries; the fruitless square around the corner emptied itself of sunlight by degrees almost imperceptible, and the hills beyond the roof-tops still gave back the glamour of a sky and a spacious western sea.

As the day died life was born again. The village found a population and a voice. One could not escape the fancy that there was some familiar and assuaging magic in this hour; that just here, between the pitiless white day and the dark night, a moment's truce was given the beleaguered island. Laughter came out of the houses. The vender of bread and yams lighted an oil-flare behind the corner of the arcade opposite; its illumination, growing stronger and yellower with the dusk, flowed out over the wall beneath the roof, filled with the shadows of turbaned heads and vast, gossiping hands.

Laborers, men and women returning from the cane-fields, came into the farther end of the street from the hills and passed below us, their bare soles treading so soundlessly on the dust that it gave them an illusion of preternatural buoyancy, never tired. A rumor of mastication went with them, a continuous crunching and tearing and sucking of the sugar-cane which each one carried, fife-fashion or clarinet-wise, to measure and refresh the homeward way. were their voices idle. Banter and gossip passed between them and the doorways. A female of the household beneath, invisible under our balcony, kept up a running fire of pleasantries, not unmelodious, but, as wit is apt to be in the Lesser Antilles, frankly fundamental.

Nor

There came a sudden and disrupting change. Time and space were obliterated in a twinkling; riot lifted its head; we sat appalled. Tumult burst around the corner two streets to the left; blaring of trumpets echoed between the crouching walls; shadows scampered before the

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 816.-104

onslaught of two round, pallid eyes and a voice of doom. And now the thing was here, and now it was gone, running on its horn alone, one would say, out into the safer barrens of the square. It was a very small and ever-present sort of car, and, judged by its careening gait, not yet thoroughly set on its shore tires; but it was new-so new that it crackledand one mulatto man was happy.

We had seen the prodigy escaping with difficulty from the hold of our very ship that morning, like one dead of the dropsy brought home in a pine box; had seen it borne shoreward over that incredible water on the back of a scow, swimming slowly; had glimpsed it for a moment on the pier, half-unveiled, coruscating and triumphant, surrounded by a pack of shining faces-after the waiting months.

For one may be sure it had been months, and not a few of them, since that letter went down from this pier, heavy with expectation, out across the roadstead, up the side of the waiting steamer, and away over the blue horizon.

But time is nothing in the Caribbees; and, anyhow, it was here now, a cherished demon. Or rather it was come and gone again, out of the square and our lives, its horn no louder in the ear than the hunting-song of the mosquito, which, let it be said, was loud enough.

Time and space returned; the twilight truce was re-established; the dusk deepened. Women were gathered about a pump in the square, their voices mingling with the soft cataract of the water which filled their earthen pitchers. Under the arcade opposite, a large, lean blackamoor sat with his shins crossed and his bare elbows pointing to the poles, consuming his evening meal of bread and boiled yam. His teeth were strong, white, and glistening in the light. His eyes, all the while, were turned with interest upon that invisible booth behind the pillar, and the heads which made the shadows we could see on the wall above his own. The thing might have been staged for our especial edification, one of those community pageants which have become so popular, and one which had by some mischance got itself started wrong end to; the vanishing monster of civilization vomiting clamor and gasolene

mist-the middle ages of tranquil twilight-and then the coming of primitive music.

One of us said, “Music?”

The rest of us sat up, too, gazed about, did something analogous to cocking the ears, said, "No," and lay back again."

And

And yet there was something, somewhere, a fine thread of sound, a meandering and unsubstantial whine. it was not a mosquito, even if one had the musuclar impulse to slap. It grew louder by degrees; when we observed those in the street beneath beginning to crane their heads all the same way, we decided that it must be so, and over in that direction. A rhythm established itself, a barbaric beat, the essential music of the tom-tom, done on something that was not a tom-tom. It came into our street.

There were five of them in that most singular band, all erect with dignity, all wearing straw hats of varying ages, all bare of foot save the tallest one in the middle of the rank, who had on tan Oxfords innocent of laces. One played a mandolin, and one a fife. One beat with a stick upon a metal triangle done by the local blacksmith. One scratched a squash with a wooden pick, and one, the blackest, shiniest, awkwardest, and altogether the most elemental and the least presentable heathen of the lot, made hoarse coughing sounds into a section of gutter-pipe, bent in the middle at an angle of thirty degrees, and wound at intervals with colored twine.

The last two instruments, let it be said, seem to be in the highest vogue among the musicians of the Caribbees and there are points to be made in their favor. As a race, the West-Indian negroes are not given to anything like profundity in the gentler arts; and the technique of the gutter-pipe bass, for instance, should not be difficult to grasp; indeed, as in the present case, its chiefest exponents seem to be artists of the very lowest intellectual type. No attempt is made to harmonize this bass with the air of the lighter pieces (if there be an air), or to distract the stately monotony of the measure with any rhythmical elaboration. Whether it be true that the bend in the middle of the instrument really "enriches the tune," as a devotee in

Dominica assured me, I am unprepared to say. The colored twine is frankly ornamental, however, as is the case of the ribbon on the small end of that dry and screeching gourd known as the "squash." And either of the two pieces may be had, one would say, at an extremely moderate outlay.

In the United States, or in any Latin country, the populace would have been at their heels, men, women, and especially children, following the music. But here none moved, not even the children. We wondered if it were "not the thing to do" in Caribbean society. Certainly they seemed interested enough, amused, if not edified, but it was only their eyes that followed the music-makers, coming and going in that singular isolation, fading away along the street, till they vanished under the encroaching night and only their wandering song came back to us, like the voice of the mosquito again.

But who were they? What was it all about? We inquired of our hostess, who had come to stand in the doorway behind us. She did not know, but she would ask. A moment later we heard her voice below, and a fragment of answer cut short by a banging door:

"Them Bassin people

They were from Christiansted, then; from Bassin, that little town on the windward side of the island of which we had heard in such pitying or contemptuous terms all day. I think we had gathered the impression that the thing which alone kept Frederiksted alive was this superior contemplation of its neighbor's still meaner state.

"There's a society from over there going to give an entertainment in the Hall to-night," our hostess told us upon her return. "The band's just to let folks know."

It came as rather a shock to learn that contemptible Bassin possessed such a thing as a "society"; worse still, that they should have the presumption_to "entertain" this regal West End. But perhaps we could understand now why people had not followed the band.

Night established itself. A vast conflagration on the summit of a hill turned out, after moments, to be the rising moon, and a sound of roaring was heard within the house. Captain Quinn,

after his twenty-eight disastrous days of sea air, had tasted of the juice of the cane, and was calling for the pianoforte and the dulcet intervals of "Home, Sweet Home."

I shall always remember that night, my first ashore in the tropics, as a night of sleepless silence filled with little sounds, of a heat oppressive and at the same time strangely electric, and of a white moonlight filling the chinks in all the blinds.

I retired quite early, overpowered by drowsiness, and there I lay for hours under a hanging sword of nervousness, bathed in perspiration, listening and listening. The night hush became orchestral; there seemed almost an intention in the play of its several voices the telling of the hours on a cracked bell in a church-tower somewhere; the waxing and waning footfalls of a passer-by, furtive as a ghost's on the cloak of dust; the interminable rustling of "women's tongues" beyond the gallery.

A dog bayed of a sudden; another and another took it up; it went away like a tocsin across the huddled roofs. And then it was a sow, far off, threatened perhaps by a phantom cleaver, and all the swine were waking. Silence returned again, ruffled only by those whispering "women's tongues." A mosquito had found that rip in the bed-net, and all one could do was wait under that winding, hideous song till it came to rest on the cheek and was done for. The clock in the tower told another half. Another mosquito was in. Or was it a mosquito? Or was it that band from Bassin? It seemed to come and go, winding the air. It was the band. The 'entertainment" was over. The itching rhythm passed away through a near-by street, and across the square beyond my blinds there was wafted a troop of soles, weightless, like a laggard night wind. A dog howled-all the dogs-and the "women's tongues" were at me again.

66

I got up, dressed myself, and went out of doors. The Draftsman was already abroad. I found him sitting on the beach under the cocoa palms, talking with Ferguson, a young newspaper man we had picked up at St. Thomas, a most delightful and entertaining fellow.

Two lights were burning in all the town behind us; one, very dim and yellow, in a shore-side café, a desolate hole in the wall, kept by a colored man who had "lived in Chelsea, Mass.;" the other in the second story of the West End Club, abreast of the landing. It must have been fifty yards away from where we sat, but in that perfection of silence we heard the cannoning of billiard-balls and the clink of the players' glasses as if we had been in the room. The trade-wind, here in the lee of the island, barely moved the fronds of the palm-trees overhead, still ragged with last year's hurricane, and the water was asleep on the white beach.

I wish I might describe the beauty of the sea as I saw it that night, under that moon. There is something curious about the moon in these islands, a quality I have never noticed anywhere else. More generous than the pale blanket of our Northern nights which silvers everything alike, here colors can still live, or at least the ghosts of colors; a wall pink in the sunlight is pink again under the moon; the hibiscus blooms a faint magenta at midnight, and the shallows of the Caribbean are still painted like a phantom peacock's breast.

I cannot say how long we talked there; at any rate, the café and the club had closed their eyes before we turned our steps back through that queer-colored town. And even then we hated to go in, and so we stood before the house and talked, leaning our elbows on the little railing around that leafless exile. We wondered about it; we made stories about it, comedies and tragedies. Ferguson reached out to touch it; it fell away under his hand and lay across the lowest rung of the iron pipe, a dry and hollow skeleton of bark. I wonder how long a time it had been dead in that foreign land.

None of us said anything after that. Like a company of murderers we filed in through the shadowy wicket, up the stair and to our rooms and our several beds, our mosquitos and dogs and bedeviled swine and night prowlers and steeple bells, and to the ceaseless dry gossiping of the pods in that tree they call the "women's tongues."

Next morning the three of us went

forth to find Christiansted, driving in no other than that very new and shining car. Ferguson took his bags along, for he planned to catch a mail-sloop there, sailing back for Charlotte Amalia; but with the Draftsman and myself it was a matter of slumming, pure and simple an expedition into the depths.

66

'Now," we said to ourselves, 'we have just time enough before our steamer sails to take one peep at the dregs of the Caribbees." And although I failed to notice it at the time, I think, as we lifted into the hills behind West End, that the crouching town must have cast after us a thwarted and malignant glare.

It is fifteen miles from West End to Bassin, the length of the island-fifteen miles of fine road fringed with cabbage palms, winding across a rolling plain of sugar-cane. In so sharp a contrast with St. Thomas and her wasted downs, and the forest silences of St. John, Santa Cruz is rich to the very crests of her hills. The tender green of cane sweeps away unbroken to the sky-line, wonderful where it strikes against the blue; and on all the little hummocks of the horizon stand broken old towers, ruinous sentinels. They had sails when the Dutchmen built them many years ago, and the trade-wind ground the cane. But now the sails are gone, and the Dutchmen; and the fat red factories of syndicates, squatting on the lowlands, do for all the island.

The pink villas of resident managers sit among the debris of ancient masonry, crumbling hamlets going back to the mother dust. Once we saw a rusted wheel on a hill, as wide as five men's outspread arms, casting its shadow over a lizard's wall. Cows were stabled beneath an arch fit for an emperor's hall. And neither the black men staring at us blank-eyed from the wains of cane, nor the resident managers in their puttees and snowy helmets, could tell us what were the names of these old places, or why they were there, or when they had died.

We had our glimpse of Christiansted, and that was all. At the end of those fifteen miles, done to a continuous and horrific accompaniment of our horn, the sea came up to meet us over a hill, and

despised Bassin broke about us, a sudden miracle, pelting us with the colors and fragrance of flowers.

Had we, as wise travelers, consulted the pages of our red West-Indian guidebook before we came ashore yesterday, we should not, perhaps, have listened with so long an ear to that plainer sister at the doorway of the island. We should have sniffed a little more, I think, at the communal wood-pile, wondering vaguely how ever this Bassin of her dark revelations came to be the seat of government for the possessions of Denmark. But even the West-Indian guide-book would not have told us that this Christiansted, tucked away on the windward shore of Santa Cruz, came nearer to one's dream than any other of the little cities of the Caribbees.

It would not have told us of this different sea, lurking for the eye in every break of the walls, an artful painting, with a chalk-mark of reef high up near the horizon, and beneath it daring brushstrokes of apple green and lilac and indigo, alive in the never-ceasing wind. It would not have told us of the red and pink and yellow buildings, so thick and ancient, and so chinked and overhung with flowered foliage; of the archways leading into storied courtyards; of the bright-red fort at the quay-side, built there, one would say, for wooden soldiers that never grow old; or of the tiny island in the ineffectual harbor, a green jewel done by a craftsman, with a narrow pedestal of surf and the house of the harbor-master half-hidden in its trees. I have never wanted to be a policeman; I have had periods of looking forward to the Presidency; but, standing on the quay that day, there was revealed to me the fairest ambition of any man-to die the harbor-master of Christiansted.

There ought to have been music to go with this place. We wanted something of strings, exotic, cloying; and we came upon a propitious figure leaning against a pillar of the Bassin Club in the square, a willowy mulatto man fondling a guitar. We gave him a shilling and told him to set about it. His brow, which had been so soft, lost its tranquillity. He tried to tell us something, but we could not understand. He was anxious, troubled. He