or
servants. The outbuildings were dilapidated, but the house after an
airing and scrubbing was as fit for entertainment as any on St. Kitts.
The furniture in the Tropics is of cane, and there are no carpets or
hangings to invite destruction. Even the mattresses are often but
plaited thongs of leather, covered with strong linen, and stretched
until they are hard as wood. All Mary Fawcett's furniture was of
mahogany, the only wood impervious to the boring of the West Indian
worm. This tiny house on the mountain needed but a day's work to clean
it, and another to transform it into an arbour of the forest. The walls
of the rooms were covered with ferns, orchids, and croton leaves. Gold
and silver candelabra had been carried up from the house, and they would
hold half a hundred candles.

All day the strong black women climbed the gorge and hill, their hips
swinging, baskets of wine, trays of delicate edibles, pyramids of linen,
balanced as lightly on their heads as were they no more in weight and
size than the turban beneath; their arms hanging, their soft voices
scolding the "pic'nees" who stumbled after them.

Toward evening, Rachael and Kitty Hamilton walked down the mountain
together, and lingered in the heavy beauty of the gorge. The ferns grew
high above their heads, and palms of many shapes. The dark machineel
with its deadly fruit, the trailing vines on the tamarind trees, the
monkeys leaping, chattering with terror, through flaming hybiscus and
masses of orchid, the white volcanic rock, the long torn leaves of the
banana tree, the abrupt declines, crimson with wild strawberries, the
loud boom of the sunset gun from Brimstone Hill--Rachael never forgot a
detail of that last walk with her old friend. Hers was not the nature
for intimate friendships, but Catherine Hamilton had been one of her
first remembered playmates, her bridesmaid, and had hastened to
companion her when she emerged from the darkness of her married life.
But Catherine was an austere girl, of no great mental liveliness, and
the friendship, although sincere, was not rooted in the sympathies and
affections. She believed Rachael to be the most remarkable woman in the
world, and had never dared to contradict her, although she lowered her
fine head to no one else. But female virtue, as they expressed it in the
eighteenth century, stood higher in her estimation than all the gifts of
mind and soul which had been lavished upon Rachael Levine, and she was