CHAPTER XIII.
Visam Britannos hospitibus feros.
Horace, Lib. 3, Carm. 4.
Mrs. Dusenall liked the visit to Kingston. She was proud of the appearance her guests and family made at the church, and she thought of going home and writing a book as prodigal of pretty woodcuts and fascinating price-lists as those published by other gilded ladies. True, she had with her no young children wherewith to awake interest in foreign places by detailing what occurred in the ship's nursery; and thus she might have been driven to say something about the foreign places themselves, which, in a book of travels, are perhaps of secondary importance when a whole gilded family may be studied in their interesting retirement.
They kept a log on the Ideal, and each one had to take his or her turn at keeping the account of the cruise posted up to date.
Some events on board or near the Ideal did not come under Mrs. Dusenall's notice and did not appear in the log-book. Nobody flirted with Mrs. Dusenall to make her experience exciting, and her book, if written, would have been one long panorama of landscape interlarded with the mildest of items. But compress your world even to the size of a yacht, and there will be still more going on, in the same eternal way, than any one person can observe, especially if that person happens to be a chaperon.
The first evening among the islands was spent in different ways. Some paddled about to explore or bathe. Flirtation of a mild type was prevalent—interesting possibly to the parties concerned, and, as usual, to themselves only. Toward dusk the gig was manned by the crew for the transportation of Mrs. Dusenall and part of her suite across the river through the islands to the hotels at Alexandria Bay on the American shore. The hotel guests on the balconies and verandas were continuing to enjoy or endure that eternal siesta which at these places seems to be quite unbroken save at meal times, and the arrival of a number of very presentable people in a handsome gig, rowed in the man-of-war style by uniformed sailors and steered by a person with a gold-lace badge on his cap, created a ripple of interest. Among those on the verandas engaged, perhaps overtaxed, in the digestion of their dinners, not a few were slightly interested by what they saw. In a group of a dozen or more a gentleman behind a solitaire shirt-stud, worth a good year's salary for a Victoria Bank clerk seemed to be speaking the thoughts of the party, though his words came out chiefly as a form of soliloquy. He seemed to be taking a sort of admiring inventory of the gig and its occupants as it approached the landing wharf:
"Small sailor boy—standing in the bow—with a spear in his hand."