There are few phases of my life upon which I look back with so much of self-reproach as upon that during which I was a sort of sportman. Several incidents came to my knowledge which finally made me leave it off entirely. After shooting game it happened that I ran up and found the poor wounded bird or rabbit, bleeding, struggling, and looking up with fear and trembling as I approached to extinguish its life and its pain. Three days after a hunting party on an island, a splendid deer was found dying beside a brook, with a bullet through his jaw which had prevented his eating, and he had lingered in starving agony all that time. I could never shoot a deer after that and I finally renounced all sporting, all shooting and fishing for mere recreation. It changes matters somewhat if one pursues sport for mere purposes of health; though it is hardly conceivable that the same end could not be gained without killing animals.
I was no better than other men; but I was led to reflect, and concluded that all and every kind of sporting for mere amusement is selfish, cruel and demoralizing in its tendencies. The sentiment of kindness and good will to others should be cultivated and extended as widely as possible, and not restricted to our own race. These sentiments are violated and stunted by indulging in any pursuit for our own pleasure, which carries terror, pain and death to any animal.
Stick to your resolution, dear Maud. Cultivate in every possible way those sentiments which are to the human character what wild flowers are to the earth. They adorn, beautify, and refine a woman and add a fragrance to life which without them is comparatively blank....
Papa.
CHAPTER VII
Santo Domingo
My father was greatly disappointed when Congress, under the whip of Charles Sumner, quashed President Grant’s plan for the annexation of Santo Domingo by refusing to ratify the treaty signed by Grant and the Dominican president, Baez. The friends of annexation, however, still had hopes of bringing the little republic under the eagle’s wing; it was probably in this interest that President Baez invited my father to revisit Santo Domingo in the winter of 1872 and bring his family with him. On the ninth of February, the day of a terrible blizzard, I sailed from New York with my father, mother, and a gay company of girl cousins and friends. Our steamer, the old Tybee, was a small crank tub; the twelve days’ passage was more uncomfortable than any ocean crossing I have ever made. My journal records that on the second day out I had not yet taken off my boots, and that on the fifth I was undressed for the first time since sailing. The captain, a quaint Yankee skipper of the old school, was so touched by my suffering that he sent two sailors to carry me from the “Black Hole of Calcutta”, six feet by eight, where three of us languished, to his own breezy deck cabin. Here I soon began to pick up. My strongest impression of the voyage is of the beauty of the Gulf Stream, crossed in cloudless weather. The intense blue of the sea, the golden gulf weed, the dazzling color of the sky were my first taste of tropical splendors.
“I am sure that water really is blue,” I said to the captain. “That color cannot be merely the sky’s reflection.”
“Here, boy! Fill a bucket over the side and show it to the young lady.”
The water in the bucket close at hand looked like any other, save for a strand of floating gulf weed.