III.
While some of the party were writing postal cards and letters in a cool, flowery retreat, reached by devious shady passages and looking out into an open court, known as a post-office, I strolled up the quiet street to the first turning, where the cross road came to an abrupt, but very beautiful end in a little white chapel, sheltered by waving palms. There seemed to be but one main street, which followed the shore awhile and then went loitering off up the hill in a most indifferent manner.
The houses, with one story in the rear and two in the front, were built on the hillside, so that the chapel before me—well up on the slope—was approached by a long flight of stone steps. Snow-white columns upheld the simple portico, and the royal palms rose higher and higher from one terrace to another, their regular trunks like stately shafts of stone, until their warm plumes met over the golden cross. The picture, with chapel and palms and terraces and flowers and delicately wroughtiron gateway, was so compact, that it seemed as if some one just a little bigger than myself might tuck the whole affair right into a pocket for a keepsake.
Turning slowly about to look for the children, I glanced through the half-open blinds of a house on the corner, and there met a pair of very engaging eyes, which besought me in the universal language, to come in and see what there was for sale. The eyes belonged not to a maiden, but to a tiny, stoop-shouldered Spanish-Danish-English woman, who fluttered about in great excitement at the prospect of a sale. Strangers do not drop from the sky every day in these remoter of the West Indies. I bought a piece of needlework, and my change, in St. Thomas silver and Danish copper, was brought me by a regal old negress, in a voluminous red calico gown, standing out like the “stu’nsails” of a full-rigged ship, flying as her proper colours aloft, a brilliant green and yellow bandanna. My! but she was tall—six feet, it seemed, and she smiled all over her face with the meaningless good-nature of her race. What teeth she had left were glistening white. By the way, why is it that on these islands you find so many women, and not necessarily old women by any means, but girls from fourteen up—both white and black—with many of their teeth gone? Has the American dentist yet untrodden fields?
Black Susan salaamed me out, and seeing Daddy and the little girls ahead of me, I followed the clean—I repeat, clean—narrow street, as it wound up the well-tilled hillside to “Bluebeard’s Castle.”