II.
Has it ever impressed you how rarely nature appeals to one’s sense of humour? She brings us infinite delights, but seldom cultivates in us our faculty of laughing. But down here off Puerto Rico, she for once leaves her beaten track of sobriety and indulges in the most extravagant caprices. How she ever thought out such a ridiculous line of hills none but Father Time could tell you; here her centuries of bottled-up giggles have burst forth, and she has made herself the most outlandish head-gear she could contrive, and here she stands, caught in the act of being silly. From this distance I should say the hills are barren, save for now and then a palm, which, dotted irregularly over the epidemic of peaks, gives the hills the forlorn look of a mole on an old woman’s cheek. There is every size of these jagged, saw-tooth peaklets jumping up in the air like so many scarecrows, and when our ship swings to her anchor and leaves us broadside to Puerto Rico’s shore, the little girls and I enter into the joke and laughingly wonder how it ever happened.
Then to match the distant landscape out came the Puerto Rican shore boats with ridiculous little open hen-coop cabins aft, much like the funny “summer cabins” affected by some New Jersey catboats—only more so. There were no end of fine modern launches of all sorts darting about us, some of them waiting for passengers, and others from our ships in the harbour bringing officers and ladies aboard, but Daddy would have none of them. He and the little girls are already under a hen-coop in one of the miserable little boats and nothing will do but I must go too. I protest, but to no avail. The stiff shore breeze makes prompt decision necessary, and I creep down under the coop an unwilling passenger; I would so much rather have been in one of the puffy boats. So off we go heeling well to the breeze as our funny, high-slung lateen sail drives us shoreward at a great rate.
We were not alone under the hen-coop, for we had some Puerto Rican musicians with us, and my qualms at the flying boat are actually forgotten in the strange but fascinating music of those natives. They carried not only the universal guitar of the usual form, but also a funny little guitar not a quarter as big as the ordinary sort, and a curious round gourd with shot or pebbles inside, which, attached to a handle, they used as a rattle, and other gourds some eighteen inches long, corrugated with many deep scratches, upon which they accented the strong beat of the measure by scraping with a bit of wire in a most dexterous manner. I can well imagine the contempt of some of our European musicians for such music, but as for myself, although trained in the most conservative of foreign schools, I could but acknowledge the deep influence of these untutored artists, and yielded myself in fascination to the weird rhythm of their music. Music to these peoples is not a dreary taskmaster, as it is to many of their Northern brothers; it is as necessary to them as is the outpouring sunlight, and they use it with a freedom and comradeship and love which is unknown to us. My senses are suffused with strange emotions of pleasure as I listen dreamily to the lullings of the water, percolated through and through by the cadences of low voices and the rhythmic repetition of single notes. I was unreal to myself even after Captain B—— and his wife, friends whom we half-hoped to meet in San Juan, had grasped our hands and led us to an army coach near by.