life. You would have found our living-room furnished in mahogany rich
and old. In a corner where the airs came in by a great window stood a
jar big enough to hide in, into which trickled a cool thread of water
from a huge dripping-stone, while above these a shelf held native
waterpots whose yellow and crimson surfaces were constantly pearled
with dew oozing through the porous ware. On a low press near by was
piled the remnant of father's library, and on the ancient sideboard
were silver candlesticks, snuffers, and crystal shades.

But it was neither these things nor cherished traditions that gave the
room its finest charm. It was filled with the glory of the sea. There
was no need of painted pictures. Living nature hung framed in wide
high windows through which drifted in the distant boom of surf on the
rocks, and salt breezes perfumed with cassia.

Outside, round about, there was far more. A broad door led by a flight
of stone steps to the couchlike roots of a gigantic turpentine-tree
whose deep shade harbored birds of every hue. To me, sitting there,
the island's old Carib name of Aye-Aye seemed the eternal consent of
God to some seraph asking for this ocean pearl. All that poet or
prophet had ever said of heaven became comprehensible in its daily
transfigurations of light and color scintillated between wave,
landscape, and cloud--its sea like unto crystal, and the trees bearing
all manner of fruits. Grace and fragrance everywhere: fruits crimson,
gold, and purple; fishes blue, orange, pink; shells of rose and pearl.
Distant hills, clouds of sunset and dawn, sky and stream, leaf and
flower, bird and butterfly, repeated the splendor, while round all
palpitated the wooing rhythm of the sea's mysterious tides.

The beach! Along its landward edge the plumed palms stood sentinel,
rustling to the lipping waters and to the curious note of the
Thibet-trees, sounding their long dry pods like castanets in the
evening breeze. By the water's margin, and in its shoals and depths,
what treasures of the underworld! Here a sponge, with stem bearing
five cups; there a sea-fan, large enough for a Titan's use yet delicate
enough to be a mermaid's. Red-lipped shells; mystical eye-stones;
shell petals heaped in rocky nooks like rose leaves; and, moving among
these in grotesque leisure, crabs of a brilliance and variety to tax
the painter. All the rector told of a fallen world seemed but idle
words when the sunset glory