s they wandered
amongst that chain of enchanted islands set in a summer sea, the
sympathetic trade winds filling their sails and tempering the heat on
shore. St. Thomas with its little city on three hills like a painted
fairy tale; St. Croix with its old Spanish arcades and palm avenues;
the red-roofed Dutch village in the green crater of St. Bartholomew,
which shot straight out of the sea without a hand's width of shore;
Antigua with its English landscapes and tropical hospitality; St.
Lucia, looking like an exploded mountain chain, that had caught the
bright plains and forests of another island while the earth was in its
throes, green as a shattered emerald by day, flaming with the long
torches of gigantic fireflies by night; St. Vincent with its smoking
volcanoes and rich plantations; Martinique, that bit of old France,
with its almost perpendicular flights of street-steps cut in the rock,
lined with ancient houses; beautiful honey-coloured women always
passing up and down with tall jars or baskets on their stately heads;
Dominica, with its rugged mountains, roaring cataracts, and brilliant
verdure; Trinidad, with its terrible cliffs, infinitely coloured
valleys, mountain masses; its groves of citron, and hedges of scarlet
hybiscus and white hydrangea, towns set in the green amphitheatres of
gentle hills, impenetrable forests, and lakes of boiling pitch:
Warner and Anne lingered on all of them, climbed to the summit of
volcanoes hidden in the clouds and gazed into awful craters evil of
smell and resounding with the menace of deep, imprisoned, persistent
tides; sailed on the quiet lake in the crater of Mt. Pelee; rode on
creole ponies for days through scented chromatic forests with serrated
heights frowning above them, and companioned by birds as vivid as the
flowers and as silent. There were no wild beasts, nothing to mar days
and nights so heavy laden with beauty that Anne wondered if the cold
North existed on the same planet, and sometimes longed for the scent
of English violets. In Trinidad they were entertained in great state
by the most distinguished of Warner's relatives, a high official of
the island. Anne wore for an evening the famous ring, and was nearly
prostrated with excitement and the fear of losing it. If she had not
been half drugged with happiness and the ineffable beauty which
scarcely for a moment deserted her waking senses, she would have
attempted to define the quiver of terror that crossed her ne