and never once did they bring contempt
on the Holy Scriptures! From below in a far end of the boat we could
hear echoes of gospel hymns in some little cabin where a
Sunday-morning service was being held.

Dorothea gave a deep sigh.

"It is all so peaceful, Charlotte! One day just like another and all
beautiful and tranquil. We haven't seen anybody hurry since we left
New York. Do you remember Rudyard Kipling saying, when he came back
there after a long absence, that he was afraid to step slowly lest the
man behind him should walk up his back? Nobody ever seems nervous in
these islands. The natives can be ragged and hungry without being much
concerned. Work never appears to be a delight to them for its own
sake, but only as a means to get food. I feel slip--slip--slipping
into a heavenly state of coma. Does anything ever stir the tropics
except hurricanes and earthquakes, I wonder? How can women fight for
suffrage in this climate? How can a man be awakened to great
ambitions?"

"Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis and passed all his boyhood and
youthful days on what is now our own St. Croix," I said.

"Yes, but he wasn't Washington's aide-de-camp nor secretary of the
treasury in the tropics!"

"True; nevertheless, when he was Nicholas Cruger's bookkeeper at the
age of twelve he wrote to an American friend: 'I contemn the groveling
condition of a clerk to which my fortunes condemn me, and I would
willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my
station.... My youth excludes me from any hope of immediate
preferment, but I mean to prepare the way for futurity.' You see the
yeast was stirring, even in the tropics, Dolly!"

"Well, I feel no yeast stirring in me," she said languidly. "All the
morning I have been trying to recapture a certain 'Ode to a Cow'
written by a man of action in a country hotel where mother and I were
sojourning last summer. I could have echoed it when I first regarded
the inhabitants of these islands, and now anybody might say it of me,
for I grow more and more cow-like with every passing day. It runs this
way:

"'ODE TO A CUD-CHEWING COW

"'Why, Cow, art thou so satisfied,
So well content with all things here below,
So meek, so lazy, and so awful slow?
Dost thou not know that men's affairs are mixed?
That grievously the world needs to be fixed?
That nothing we can do has any worth?