Chapter VIII

And ever through tepid nights and azure days the _Guadeloupe_ rushes on,--her wake a river of snow beneath the sun, a torrent of fire beneath the stars,--steaming straight for the North.

Under the peaking of Montserrat we steam,--beautiful Montserrat, all softly wrinkled like a robe of greenest velvet fallen from the waist!--breaking the pretty sleep of Plymouth town behind its screen of palms... young palms, slender and full of grace as creole children are;--

And by tall Nevis, with her trinity of dead craters purpling through ocean-haze;--by clouded St. Christopher's mountain-giant;--past ghostly St. Martin's, far-floating in fog of gold, like some dream of the Saint's own Second Summer;--

Past low Antigua's vast blue harbor,--shark-haunted, bounded about by huddling of little hills, blue and green.

Past Santa Cruz, the "Island of the Holy Cross,"--all radiant with verdure though well nigh woodless,--nakedly beautiful in the tropic light as a perfect statue;--

Past the long cerulean reaching and heaping of Porto Rico on the left, and past hopeless St. Thomas on the right,--old St. Thomas, watching the going and the coming of the commerce that long since abandoned her port,--watching the ships once humbly solicitous for patronage now turning away to the Spanish rival, like ingrates forsaking a ruined patrician;--

And the vapory Vision of, St. John;--and the grey ghost of Tortola,--and further, fainter, still more weirdly dim, the aureate phantom of Virgin Gorda.