asonable man, and do your duty, and thank God for
what you have been allowed to see; and try to become of the same
mind as that most brilliant of old ladies, who boasted that she had
not been abroad since she saw the Apotheosis of Voltaire, before the
French Revolution; and did not care to go, as long as all manner of
clever people were kind enough to go instead, and write charming
books about what they had seen for her.

But the westward fever was slow to cool: and with wistful eyes we
watched the sun by day, and Venus and the moon by night, sink down
into the gulf, to lighten lands which we should never see. A few
days more, and we were steaming out to the Bocas--which we had begun
to love as the gates of a new home--heaped with presents to the last
minute, some of them from persons we hardly knew. Behind us Port of
Spain sank into haze: before us Monos rose, tall, dark, and grim--
if Monos could be grim--in moonless night. We ran on, and past the
island; this time we were going, not through the Boca de Monos, but
through the next, the Umbrella Bocas. It was too dark to see
houses, palm-trees, aught but the ragged outline of the hills
against the northern sky, and beneath, sparks of light in sheltered
coves, some of which were already, to one of us, well-beloved nooks.
There was the great gulf of the Boca de Monos. There was
Morrison's--our good Scotch host of seven weeks since; and the
glasses were turned on it, to see, if possible, through the dusk,
the almond-tree and the coco-grove for the last time. Ah, well--
When we next meet, what will he be, and where? And where the
handsome Creole wife, and the little brown. Cupid who danced all
naked in the log canoe, till the white gentlemen, swimming round,
upset him; and canoe, and boy, and men rolled and splashed about
like a shoal of seals at play, beneath the cliff with the Seguines
and Cereuses; while the ripple lapped the Moriche-nuts about the
roots of the Manchineel bush, and the skippers leaped and flashed
outside, like silver splinters? And here, where we steamed along,
was the very spot where we had seen the shark's back-fin when we
rowed back from the first Guacharo cave. And it was all over.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of. And as in a dream, or
rather as part of a dream, and myself a phantom and a play-actor, I
looked out over the side, and saw on the right the black Avails of
Monos, on the left the b