WE were skirting the Island of Margherita, which belongs to Venezuela and produces pearls of small size but excellent quality. I was smoking an after-dinner cigar with Dr. Leyden, the collector, who earns his living by supplying museums and professors with specimens from the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds.
“Did you ever notice, Doctor,” he asked, suddenly, “how African blood is curdled by being mixed with Anglo-Saxon?”
“I had always thought,” said I, “that African blood mixes badly with any other.”
“No. With Latin blood it will combine like whisky and soda, but the Anglo-Saxon plasma exerts upon it an action like that of alcohol upon albumen——” He paused and absently followed the course of a school of flying-fish that flickered suddenly from the swash alongside and skittered away across the dancing waves.
“What suggested this topic to your mind?” I asked, curiously, for we had been discussing the relative naval strength of Germany and the United States.
“That island.” He nodded toward Margherita as it rose, rough in outline, but with the misty softness of distance, from the quiet, pink and purple sea. The sun was resting on the rim of the sky-line, and its late rays bathed the lavender slopes of the mountains, that rose in tumbling confusion, their summits blazing with high-lights and their feet already clothed in slanting shadows.
Almost as we watched, the sun slipped under the sea; a multi-colored breeze rippled the face of the water; opalescent flashes sparkled here and there from the sails of the little Portuguese men-of-war, and then the day-light began to wane, as it seemed, in rhythmic beats.
“Odd,” continued Leyden, clinging with Teutonic persistency to his theory, conscious but unaffected by his exquisite surroundings. “The popular idea is that an individual having a drop of African blood is more negro than white, even though the white predominates, as in the case of a quadroon or octoroon. This is wrong, Doctor. The white is by far the more potent strain, but, because it is more apt to color the mind than the skin, it is not recognized as such.”
“Primitive organizations are usually more virile,” I began.