as by day and
by night. The picture was too one-sided, too heavily daubed with colour.
It made a palette of the imagination, sticky and crude. He began to
desire the green plantations of St. Croix, and more than ever he longed
for the snow-fields of the north. Two days of hard work concluded Mr.
Cruger's business, and on the thirtieth of the month he weighed anchor,
in company with many others, and set sail for St. Croix. He started
under a fair breeze, but a mile out the wind dropped, and he was until
midnight making the harbour of Christianstadt When they were utterly
becalmed the sun seemed to focus his hell upon the little sloop. It
rolled sickeningly in the oily wrinkled waters, and Alexander put his
Pope in his pocket. The sea had a curious swell, and he wondered if an
earthquake were imminent. The sea was not quite herself when her
foundations were preparing to shake. Earth-quakes had never concerned
him, but as the boat drifted past the reef into the harbour of
Christianstadt at midnight, he was assailed by a fit of terror so sudden
and unaccountable that he could recall but one sensation in his life
that approached it: shortly after he arrived on the Island he had stolen
down to the lagoon one night, fascinated by the creeping mist, the
scowling manchineels, the talk of its sinister inhabitant, and was
enjoying mightily his new feeling of creeping terror, when the silence
was broken by a heavy swish, and he saw the white belly of the shark not
three feet from him. He had scampered up the hill to his mother's skirts
as fast as his legs could carry him, nor visited the lagoon again until
the shark was mouldering on its bed. To-night a mist, almost
imperceptible except on the dark line of coast, changed the beauty of
the moonbeams to a livid light that gave the bay the horrid pallor of a
corpse. The masses of coral rock in the shallow waters looked leprous,
the surface was so glassy that it fell in splinters from the oars of the
boat that towed them to shore. There was not a sound from the reef, not
a sound from the land. The slender lacing mangroves in the swamp looked
like upright serpents, black and petrified, and the Fort on the high
bluff might have been a sarcophagus full of dead men but for the
challenge of the sentry.

Alexander began to whistle, then climbed down into the boat and took an
oar. When he had his feet on land he walked up King Street more hastily
than was his habit in the month of August. But