this troubled Dyck Calhoun; nor, indeed, was he shocked by
the fact that nearly every unmarried white man in the island, and many
married white men, had black mistresses and families born to the black
women, and that the girls had no married future. They would become the
temporary wives of white men, to whom they were on the whole faithful
and devoted. It did not even vex him that a wretched mulatto might be
whipped in the market-square for laying his hands upon a white man, and
that if he was a negro-slave he could be shot for the same liberty.

It all belonged to the abnormal conditions of an island where black and
white were in relations impossible in the countries from which the white
man had come. It did not even startle Dyck that all the planters, and
the people generally in the island, from the chief justice and custos
rotulorum down to the deckswabber, cultivated amplitude of living.

But let Dyck tell his own story. The papers he held were sheets of a
letter he was writing to one from whom he had heard nothing since the
night he enlisted in the navy, and that was nearly three years before.
This was the letter:

MY DEAR FRIEND:

You will see I address you as you have done me in the two letters I
have had from you in the past. You will never read this letter, but
I write it as if you would. For you must know I may never hope for
personal intercourse with you. I was imprisoned for killing your
father, Erris Boyne, and that separates us like an abysss. It
matters little whether I killed him or not; the law says I did, and
the law has taken its toll of me. I was in prison for four years,
and when freed I enlisted in the king's navy, a quota man, with my
servant-friend, Michael Clones. That was the beginning of painful
and wonderful days for me. I was one of the mutineers of the Nore,
and--

Here followed a description of the days he had spent on the Ariadne and
before, and of all that happened down to the time when he was arrested
by the admiral in the West Indian Sea. He told how he was sent over to
the Ariadne with Captain Ivy to read the admiral's letter to the seamen,
and then, by consent of the admiral, to leave again with Michael
Clones for Jamaica, where he was set ashore with twenty pounds in his
pocket--and not on parole, by the admiral's command. Here the letter
shall again take up the story, and be a narrative of Dyck Calhoun's life
from that time until this Chris