was too much for human vision and the young
heart trembled before its ineffable suggestions.

I often rode a pony. If we turned inland our way was on a road
double-lined with cocoa palms, or up some tangled dell where a silvery
cascade leaped through the deep verdure. On one side the tall mahogany
dropped its woody pears. On another, sand-box and calabash trees
rattled their huge fruit like warring savages. Here the banyan hung
its ropes and yonder the tamarind waved its feathery streamers. Here
was the rubber-tree, here the breadfruit. Now and then a clump of the
manchineel weighted the air with the fragrance of its poisonous apples,
the banana rustled, or the bamboo tossed its graceful canes. Beside
some stream we might espy black washerwomen beetling their washing.
Or, reaching the summit of Blue Mountain, we might look down, eleven
hundred feet, on the vast Caribbean dotted with islands, and, nearer
by, on breakers curling in noble bays or foaming under rocky cliffs.
Northward, the wilderness; eastward, green fields of sugar-cane paling
and darkling in the breeze; southward, the wide harbor of
Fredericksted, the town, and the black, red-shirted boatmen pushing
about the harbor; westward, the setting sun; and presently, everywhere,
the swift fall of the tropical night, with lights beginning to twinkle
in the town and the boats in the roadstead to leave long wakes of
phosphorescent light.

Of course nature had also her bad habits. There were sharks in the
sea, and venomous things ashore, and there were the earthquake and the
hurricane. Every window and door had heavy shutters armed with bars,
rings, and ropes that came swiftly into use whenever between July and
October the word ran through the town, "The barometer's falling." Then
candles and lamps were lighted indoors, and there was happy excitement
for a courageous child. I would beg hard to have a single pair of
shutters held slightly open by two persons ready to shut them in a
second, and so snatched glimpses of the tortured, flying clouds and
writhing trees, while old Si' Myra, one of the freed slaves who never
had left us, crouched in a corner and muttered:

"Lo'd sabe us! Lo'd sabe us!"

Once I saw a handsome brig which had failed to leave the harbor soon
enough stagger in upon the rocks where it seemed her masts might fall
into our own grounds, and grandmamma told me that thus my father,
though born in the island, had first met my mother.