re gone, and Nassau is given up to a sleepy trade
in sponges and tortoise-shell, and peace is no name for the drowsy tenor
of the days under the palm trees and the scarlet poincianas. A little
group of Government buildings surrounding a miniature statue of Queen
Victoria, flanked by some old Spanish cannon and murmured over by the
foliage of tropic trees, gives an air of old-world distinction to the
long Bay street, whose white houses, with their jalousied verandas, ran
the whole length of the water-front, and all the long sunny days the air
is lazy with the sound of the shuffling feet of the child-like "darky"
population and the chatter of the bean-pods of the poincianas overhead.

Here a handful of Englishmen, clothed in the white linen suits of the
tropics, carry on the Government after the traditional manner of British
colonies from time immemorial, each of them, like my friend, not
without an English smile at the humour of the thing, supporting the
dignity of offices with impressive names--Lord Chief Justice, Attorney
General, Speaker of the House, Lord High Admiral, Colonial Secretary and
so forth--and occasionally a figure in gown and barrister's wig flits
across the green from the little courthouse, where the Lord Chief
Justice in his scarlet robes, on a dais surmounted by a gilded lion and
unicorn, sustains the majesty of British justice, with all the pomp of
Westminster or Whitehall.

My friend the Secretary of the Treasury is a man possessing in an
uncommon degree that rare and most attractive of human qualities,
companionableness. He is a quiet man of middle age, an old white-headed
bachelor with a droll twinkling expression, speaking seldom, and then in
a curious silent fashion, as though the drowsy heat of the tropics had
soaked him through and through. With his white hair, his white clothes,
his white moustachios, his white eyelashes, over eyes that seem to hide
away among quiet mirthful wrinkles, he carries about him the sort of
silence that goes with a miller, surrounded by the white dusty quiet of
his mill.

As we sit together in the hush of his snuggery of an evening,
surrounded by guns, fishing-lines, and old prints, there are times when
we scarcely exchange a dozen words between dinner and bed-time, and yet
we have all the time a keen and satisfying sense of companionship. It is
John Saunders's gift. Companionship seems quietly to ooze out of him,
without the need of words. He and you are there in