uis expressed himself enchanted with his new home.
The plantation was a wonder to him, the half-naked negroes and their
wholly nude progeny a surprise, and the brutality with which they were
treated caused him a transient emotion. In turtle fishing he found an
agreeable novelty, and in the shooting of doves and the blue-headed
partridge he became an immediate adept. But when a fortnight had come
and gone he felt vaguely bored; he grew tired of strange and sticky
fruits, the call of chromatic birds jarred, discordant, on his nerves,
the turtles lost their allurement, the weight of purple days oppressed
him. In brief, he thought he had quite enough of rural life in the
tropics. Aside from his father, there was not, on the estate, a soul of
his own race with whom he could exchange a word. And though he had
nothing whatever to say, yet such is the nature of youth that he
heartily wished himself back in Spain. The young girl that lived there
over the way he would have hailed as life's full delight, and two or
three of her scrappy letters, which through some oversight he had
neglected to turn into cigarette-lighters, he set to work to decipher
anew. The writer of them was an ethereal young person with a pretty
taste for fine sentiments, and as Ruis possessed himself of the candors
of her thought, he very much wished that he could kneel immediately at
her feet.

From the early forenoon until the sun has begun to set it is not at all
agreeable, or prudent either, for the unacclimated to be astir in that
part of the planet in which Don Jayme's hacienda was situated. But the
mornings are mellow indeed, the dusk is languorous in its beauty, and as
for the nights, none others in all the world can compare with them. The
stars are as lilies set in parterres of indigo. In the air is a perfume
and a caress.

And Ruis, out of sheer laziness, made the most of the dusk and the early
hours. At sunrise he was on horseback scouring the country, now over the
red road in the direction of the town, and again across the savannas,
past cool thin streams and ravines that were full of shadow, mystery,
and green. And when the sun had lost its ardor he would be off again,
and return in company with the moon. As a rule he met but few people,
sometimes a man or two conveying garden produce to the sea-port,
sometimes women with eggs and poultry, now and then a negro, and once a
priest. But practically the roads were unfrequented, and without
incident