Before we have time to readjust our impressions of one island to the anticipated pleasures of the one following, we are among a new people, speaking a strange tongue, living to us a new life,—to them a weather-worn old life; among people in densely populated cities, shut off from our world by weeks—at times by months—of silent isolation.
Then all at once a fleck of smoke lifts above the horizon, a steamer is sighted far out at sea, the pilot puts out in his little open boat, and the whole island throbs with new emotion, for a ship is coming!
From a poetical standpoint, I wish it were possible to believe that this emotion is a disinterested pleasure in welcoming strangers; in feeling once again the hand of man from the great world outside. Viewing the people, as we must, largely from an impersonal standpoint, it impressed us that the West Indian cares very little for the welcome or for the hand of man from the great continent; but that he is up early in the morning to devise new ways of reaching the pockets of the invaders, come they ever so peaceably.
The natives await the coming of strangers, as a pack of hungry wolves watch for the shorn lamb. I myself have been that shorn lamb on several occasions.