mas Mitchell's house, he could see
the lively Park behind the Fort; the boats sail over from the blue peaks
of St. Thomas and St. John, the long white line of the sounding reef.
Above the walls of Government House was the high bold curve of the
mountain with its dazzling facades, its glitter of green. In the King
Street of that day gentlemen in knee breeches and lace shirts, their
hair in a powdered queue, were as familiar objects as turbaned blacks
and Danes in uniform. After riding over their plantations "to hear the
cane grow," they almost invariably brought up in town to talk over
prospects with the merchants, or to meet each other at some more jovial
resort. Sometimes they came clattering down the long road in a coach and
four, postilions shouting at the pic'nees in the road, swerving, and
halting so suddenly in some courtyard, that only a planter, accustomed
to this emotional method of travel, could keep his seat. Ordinarily he
preferred his horse, perhaps because it told no tales.

Thomas Mitchell had made his large fortune in the traffic of slaves, and
was on terms of doubtful courtesy with Peter Lytton, who disapproved the
industry. Blacks were by no means his only source of revenue; he had
one of the two large general stores of the Island--the other was
Nicholas Cruger's--and plantations of cane, whose yield in sugar,
molasses, and rum never failed him. He was not a pleasing man in his
family, and did not extend the hospitality of its roof to Alexander with
a spontaneous warmth. His own children were married, and he did not look
back upon the era of mischievous boys with sufficient enthusiasm to
prompt him to adopt another. He yielded to his wife's voluble
supplications because domestic harmony was necessary to his content, and
Mistress Mitchell had her ways of upsetting it. Alexander was
immediately too busy with his studies to pay attention to the
indifferent grace with which Mr. Mitchell accepted his lot, and,
fortunately, this industrious merchant was much away from home. Hugh
Knox, as the surest means of diverting the boy from his grief, put him
at his books the day after he arrived in Christianstadt. His own house
was on Company Street, near the woods out of which the town seemed to
spring; and in his cool library he gathered his boys daily, and crammed
their brains with Latin and mathematics. The boys had met at Peter
Lytton's before, but Knox easily persuaded them to the new arrangement,
which was as g