got a strangle-hold all right. Thinks I, I guess there'll be
something doing when Wall Street gets this news--that old H. H. is
food for the finny denizens of the deep!"

"Such an event, Mr. Tubbs," pronounced Violet, who had recovered
her form with surprising swiftness, "might well have sent its
vibrations through the financial arteries of the world!"

"It would have been most--most shocking!" quavered poor Aunt Jane
with feeling. She was piteously striving to extricate herself from
the folds of the green veil.

I came to her assistance. The poor plump little woman was
trembling from head to foot.

"It was a most--unusual experience," she told me as I unwound her.
"Probably extremely--unifying to the soul-forces and all that, as
Miss Browne says, but for the moment--unsettling. Is my helmet on
straight, dear? I think it is a little severe for my type of face,
don't you? There was a sweet little hat in a Fifth Avenue
shop--simple and yet so chic. I thought it just the thing, but
Miss Browne said no, helmets were always worn--Coffee? Oh, my dear
child, how thankful I shall be!"

And Aunt Jane clung to me as of yore as I led her up the beach.

V

THE CAPTAIN'S LEGACY

When in my tender years I was taken to the matinee, usually the
most thrilling feature of the spectacle to me was the scene
depicted on the drop-curtain. I know not why only the decorators
of drop-curtains are inspired to create landscapes of such strange
enchantment, of a beauty which not alone beguiles the senses--I
speak from the standpoint of the ten-year-old--but throws wide to
fancy the gate of dreams. Directly I was seated--in the body--and
had had my hat taken off and been told not to wriggle, I vaulted
airily over the unconscious audience, over an orchestra engaged in
tuning up, and was lost in the marvelous landscape of the
drop-curtain. The adventures which I had there put to shame any
which the raising of the curtain permitted to be seen upon the
stage.

I had never hoped to recover in this prosaic world my long-lost
paradise of the drop-curtain, but morning revealed it to me here on
Leeward Island. Here was the feathery foliage, the gushing
springs, the gorgeous flowers of that enchanted land. And here
were the soft and intoxicating perfumes that I had imagined in my
curtain landscape.

Leeward Island measures roughly four miles across from east to west
by three from north to south. The core of the island is the