CHAPTER V

SANTO DOMINGO AND HAITI

1

Over the sea in a tiny boat to the island of Haiti, and to the eastern half of it which is called Santo Domingo. The voyage is still westward and along the eighteenth parallel and not for long out of sight of land, be it the northern shore of Porto Rico or the southern shore of Santo Domingo. The sea reeks with warm exhalations, and in the turgid water lurk sharks. Don't fall off the ship as she lurches and rolls and you hold to the ropes--you may not be saved if you do.

Twenty-four hours brings you to the little tropic river where the massed palm trees with their bushy heads peep forth out of the jungle at the intruder. And we slush slowly along the banks through the heat to a jaded-looking dock and some clammy warehouses, and behold, it is the capital of the Dominican Republic; I suppose one of the meanest and dirtiest capitals in the world. Yonder is the Government Building, on which flies the white-crossed flag of the Republic and level with it the Stars and Stripes of the United States. For the republic has the brokers in. She borrowed heavily and unwisely, and then could not pay--and so the customs were seized, and, with the customs, government itself. Santo Domingo is now virtually an American possession and part of the new empire which is springing into being and promising to condition the future of the American people. On a little hill outside the city is a training camp with its motto picked out in white stones in an attractive pattern: "In time of Peace, prepare for War." And one wakens in the morning to the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner," played somewhere afar.

Down by that tropic little river stands the stump of Columbus's tree, the actual tree to which the discoverer moored his ship when he came in on that morning of the fifth of December, 1492, and was met by the amazed tribesmen. Nine months ago it was a still living tree, and it is part of the grievance of the Dominicans that the marines tried to preserve it for all time by cutting it open and filling its hollow center with cement. That killed it. But it is a mighty burly stump, some fifteen feet high and of great girth. It sprawls rather, it has a burly moving shoulder and a bearded aspect that suggests a sort of Rip Van Winkle Christopher Columbus, enchanted for four hundred and thirty years and now stepping ashore.

What a change for the old man to see! Those chiefs, those red men and women who gave jewels for beads, all killed to the last child two hundred years ago. Africans are in their place, smooth and black, everywhere, as if they had come and conquered it. But they came as slaves and then won their freedom from Spaniards and from Frenchmen. Some speak Spanish, some speak bits of French. Further on, in Haiti all speak French. Where are the bold Spaniards with their flashing eyes and flashing blades, their wills, their lusts? Gone like the great trees of the river side. Gone like the Indians. Gone like the French who came after them. Mixed and married with the Negroes, or else gone soft and gentle as Orientals.

"These strapping fellows, these giants in sand-colored clothes?" Columbus might ask. "American soldiers," you would reply, and then conduct the poor old wight to the Carnegie Library and the shelves of the Encyclopedia Americana. It needs some explaining. Discovering America was child's play compared with explaining to Columbus the rise of the American Republic of the North.

Anyhow, here I am at the Hotel Inglaterra, and down below me is a bar where there is "beer on ice" and the "best old rum," for Santo Domingo has not been made dry, and there sit marines all in white and argue it over their pots. The question is: "Do not the Haitians eat their children at the age of five--not all of them, of course, but selected kids at festivals? Do not the outlaws and brigands of Santo Domingo need to be stamped out? Or again, Who has prior rights in the Panama Canal? Do not British warships come through without paying dues while American warships pay? Are not all vessels towed by electric mules through the canal?" They bet millions of dollars, they bet their adjectival shirts, because they know.

Outside is the city market place, where are sold live crabs and tortoises on strings and mangoes and gourds and coconuts and sugar-candy babies on wire. And black girls with coral ornaments and vari-colored turbans or kerchiefs do the selling--while purchasers on asses, on backs of calves, or walking with huge bundles on their heads, go past. The black people laugh and shout. It doesn't seem to mean much to them that they have no President and that their republic is in abeyance. They do not bet on what is going to happen, and they do not know. When you buy an orange for a cent they say to you _Grand merci_ and are ever so pleased. In the square is a fine statue of Cristobal Colon, who points west by southwest to Latin America, bidding all men still think of a new world. But I am forgetting. Did I not leave him in the Library with the encyclopedia? Is it not there, on the shelf, that he will find his true place, in a history that is past?

2

Though at first sight the population of the capital of the Dominican Republic may strike the traveler as being wholly black, there are nevertheless a number of persons of fairer complexion--the people of the first families, the _aristokratia_. One or two of these are German. These keep within their houses more than do the Negroes who trade and traffic and gossip in market place and main street.

The island has a bad history. Columbus loved it as the first large materialization of his dream of a beyond--a transatlantic land. But the Spaniards raised Cain there, and the Negroes and French after them. The Indians were killed off early, and the Spaniards were soon killing one another. Bandits and pirates have lived there more securely than any one else.

It was in 1697 that the French came in. Spain ceded half the island to her. The French bred in rapidly with the colored people. The country became known as Haiti, and French was the spoken tongue. French Negro slaves in considerable numbers were imported. A hundred years later the rest of the island was ceded to France. That was in the Napoleonic era. England was at war with Spain, and in 1809 British warships stood off the little tropic harbor and gave encouragement to an uprising of Spanish colonists who proved successful in wresting the city from the French. By the Treaty of Paris in 1814 French rule was confined to the eastern part of the island--Haiti.

There came then speedily the great liberation movement of Latin America (1821-1825). Santo Domingo was able to succeed where Porto Rico failed. But hardly had the new republic proclaimed its independence when the Negroes of Haiti descended upon it and broke it up. Haiti by that time had also won independence. For nearly a quarter of a century the Haitians remained in control of the whole island. In 1844 a Dominican insurrection was successful, but there was no peace with Haiti, who seems to have been always the stronger power. Santo Domingo was forced to try to return to the bosom of Spain. In 1861 the president of the republic became governor, and the republic joined Spain. Two years later war against Spain was started and in 1865 the republic was restored. In 1868 the republic tried to join the United States, but America was not then willing. Insurrectionary movements followed one another with rapidity till the Negro general Ulysses Heureux obtained control of the country. He, it is said, pursued the policy later adopted by Lenin in Russia of having all his enemies killed, but he himself did not escape and was assassinated at last. It is said he ran the republic very deeply into debt. One wonders why financiers should have been willing to lend money to such a State. Some five millions sterling were owing, later it became six and a half millions. There was talk of foreign intervention. Some European power might have felt entitled to seize the country.

American policy had, however, somewhat changed. In 1899 the United States entered into possession of Porto Rico and into control of Cuba. Santo Domingo was one half of the island that lay between. Rather than see a foreign power installed, America decided to control Santo Domingo also.

The republic was asked if she still required aid from Washington, and the United States agreed to control the customs, organize receipts, pay interest on debts and pension the government. This she has done very effectively and remains in economic and military control to-day; Santo Domingo with a constitution in suspended animation having become an American Protectorate.

Apparently now most Dominicans would like the Americans to go, but they have no power to make them. The Americans for their part can point justifiably to the improved conditions on the island. If they went, the human dogfight would begin anew. However, let us to the country!

3

I have heard it said in London that those who live in half-houses are the aristocrats of the slums. The quaint expression may also be applied to the colored folk who live in cabins. They are the black aristocracy of the islands. It was in vain that I pitied the plight of the dwellers in the marine- and saffron-colored dolls' houses of Porto Rico. The real underdog of these parts does not pretend to any little wooden hut. He lives gregariously in the bush like the larvae of the Lackey Moth. He squats in the shadow and shine of tattered palm branches, he is rustling with his family just beyond the green fans of the wild bananas. In crossing the island of Haiti only two things share the attention--the magnificence of untamed nature and the wildness of man.

Not that the men and women have relapsed to primitive savagery. They are fully dressed, as fully as any one could care to be, and, except for little children, seem to be afraid of nakedness. In Russia, in some parts, you may see scores of men, women, and children promiscuously naked upon a river bank; but the wild children of the sun of Haiti will not even bathe in the sea unless discreetly covered. In the Africa whence they came they wore little more than a _cache-sexe_, but the slaves learned a decorum of dress from the Spaniard in the old Colonial days and it has remained.

They are very civil too, and talk to you willingly in a French patois or in a broad Spanish which is far from the Spanish of Madrid. But they are poor, live largely on fruit, have none of the amenities of life, and being exposed to the tropical heat, they are also exposed to the exhalations of the jungle and to its insects. They are magnificent specimens of the human race till disease touches them. What erect and beautiful women, what positively Adamlike men! My eyes fed on many pictures of human perfection. But alas for disease! Smallpox rages among them. You see beautiful boys and girls the color of the mahogany trees amongst which they live, but all blurred and shadow-marked as if there were a fault in the tissue. And when one of them dies he is just buried somewhere at the back, like a dog or a cat.

Little smallpox-stricken girls with the disease still on them come up with bunches of bananas or mangoes for sale, their open faces looking out from a hundred disease-eyes. It makes the heart ache, and also prompts the thought--what a place for a medical missionary!

The island swarms with bandits. There is only one road across it and that was opened only a month before. Its interior is extremely obscure, unvisited, and uncontrolled. It offers in an otherwise unqualified way a divine adventure for a young doctor willing to devote his life to human beings.

Personally I do not believe the stories of moral depravity, the cannibalism, which is said to have broken out among the people. They are not so starved as that. They have not been exploited in the way the people of the other islands have. Cubans will eat one another before Haitians. But they get married without going to church, it is true, and have children who remain unbaptized. Otherwise they are "good Catholics," some of the best I have seen. There is no doubt about it--the inside of a church, where there is a church, is one of the best social scenes in Haiti. The women may often go in uncovered, and the holy water bowl be dry, or the worshipers may not know when or how to cross themselves--but the loveliness and simplicity of service are in utter contrast to the world outside, to the jungle, and to the ordinary ways of men and women.

You sit in a vast sky-blue church in the evening and watch the children, with chaplets in their hair and garlands of flowers in their hands, and listen to the Spanish singing. And girls all in white go up to the Madonna with armfuls of flowers and, throwing their heads and their breasts to her, yearn to her and gesticulate and perorate and fling down their flower sacrifices and go. And the priest lights the incense over the flower-heaped altar so that every blossom smokes upwards to the Virgin's feet.

Oh, to live in that atmosphere always and be at peace! You realize the sweet emotion, though you know that character and the world's reactions forbid that you shall take it far.

I stayed at a pleasant city called Santiago of the Gentlemen. The Americans call it Santiago of the Bandits, but it seemed to be a brighter city than the capital, having more pretensions to civilization. The steel mosquito gratings on the verandas of the hotel were commendable. How can one enjoy one's days when the mosquitoes chase you all night!

It would, however, be vain to seek in the island of Haiti the comforts and conventions of Porto Rico. The United States is in control, but it is proving more difficult to introduce new ways of living. The mahogany-colored chambermaids of the hotel smoke heavy black cigars as they work, and every time Yokine, who waits on me, wants to light up afresh she makes an errand to my room for the matches beside my candlestick. My bedroom is just a section of a dormitory divided off by wooden partitions. The bed is surmounted by a high-domed-mosquito-netting cage which is a room in itself once you are inside.

There is no such thing as a "room with a bath" on the island. Round the corner from the veranda is a mildewed douche which drops water on your back in beneficent but not abundant trickles. It is not entirely private and you should keep your eyes on two doors whilst you wash. And there are sometimes other occupants beside yourself, to wit, the giant Roach and his family. Father Roach is very fond of water, and when you turn on the shower he also comes forth to share in the splash.

In other parts of the hotel the roaches are portentous. One tries to find a likeness for them. They are like old-fashioned brown metal trunks, a little reduced in size. The sideboard in the dining room might be the grand terminal station of some city of the gnomes, and drawn up outside it are a score of brown cabs, some waiting, some moving.

Or if they are not cabs they are little brown pups. The waiters treat them brutally, but I feed them from my plate and they make off with a bit of bread or a quiver of Spanish omelette as readily as cat or dog.

I see little lizards also running up the dining-room wall. The most interesting extra gentleman lodger, however, is the tropical spider. He is not gigantic but gigantesque, as big as the palm of your hand; speedy, audacious, voracious. He lives not in a web but on a wall, on a series of walls, and no other spider dare stay on it with him for a couple of minutes. Ah, here he comes, sprawling over the dusty map of the island of Haiti hanging in the hall. A Dominican politician smiles and points at him and would whisper something about the military government of which he sees a symbol.

There is a steady malice against Americans, and as I am English the other guests of the hotel open their hearts. They take pleasure in scratching crosses on the figure of Liberty on the American money. Their own money has largely disappeared, but a fine coin the size and appearance of a silver dollar is now reckoned as only twenty cents. They say it is intrinsically worth forty cents, and that an American bank collected some millions of them, took them to New York, and sold them at a large profit. There are two great banking institutions on the island: one is American, the other is the Royal Bank of Canada. The Dominicans assure me they place all their business with the Royal Bank. They say that the dollar has impoverished them because it has raised the cost of living so terribly. They retaliate by using the British bank.

I imagine that may be so, as I pay forty cents for a half bottle of very bad Hamburg beer. It could not have cost more than four cents in Hamburg. The dinner is very simple, no French flourishes of cuisine, no Spanish traditions either, but there is enough; three beef courses and then guava jelly and coffee. And for this you pay at the same rate as you would at Shepheards hotel in Cairo. Or you may pay more.

I am told by Dominicans that the republic in bondage is doing so well that the 1908 bonds due in 1958 will probably be paid off in 1925, and the 1918 bonds due in 1938 would be paid this year (1923). There is a certain new artificial prosperity. It is due to the fact that the inhabitants have been forced to think in dollars and cents, and cease thinking in pesos and gramos. But the Dominican, it seems, will not take the blessings of peace and prosperity into account when it is balanced against political liberty.

I go out to the promenade of the town. I see the lonely American soldiers sitting bored on the park seats, and not one of them with a girl or a chum.

"No one will go with them," says a Dominican. "We don't feel anything against them personally, we know they are only sent by their government and have to obey. But we are against their government and always shall be till they go."

This was spoken by one of the white Spanish aristocracy who are now endeavoring to organize a passive boycott in the island.

Santiago of the Gentlemen is Santiago of the Ladies also. Behold a remarkable festival takes place, which brings the ladies forth in all their finery. The _fiesta_ is in honor of the new road which has joined city with city. After four hundred years Santiago has been connected with the Capital by a road. Up till May of this year there was only an adventurous horseman's trail. But due to the bustling United States of America the hundred and seventy kilometers between Santiago and the city of Santo Domingo has been bridged. Henceforth it is undignified to be seen on a horse--only the poor people, the blacks, the beggars, go on horses. All people who are people go in Ford cars. The super-hooters tear along the highway, and the sultry mango trees drooping with their fruit look as if civilization were dawning on them at last. And the snakes that would bask on the way have learned of a new fast-going enemy that roars like a lion and bumps over them like an elephant and yet flies past like an eagle.

The worthies of the city have issued the most grandiosely worded invitations to the Capitalaños to a three days' general "at home," banquet, and ball. It is a good idea. Santiago is up in the fresher air, a wind is always blowing. The mosquitoes are fewer, and the nights are cool. Indeed, the ladies of the capital carry fur wraps in the evening when the temperature drops to about 70°. Not that any one walks anywhere by day. It is much too hot for that, and if I set off for the river on foot they look at me from their cars and stare. Many people wear green or yellow sun spectacles, which look quaint against a dark complexion. The light is not, however, so glaring as in Egypt or Central Asia, and the heat seems much easier to bear.

I have come to the conclusion that life on these tropical islands can be very good all the year round. The heat does not devitalize one, though something in the air seems to whisper that nothing in the whole world is of any importance. Those who come to Santo Domingo soon feel the "lure" and are ready to stay there forever. I watched the routine of the American soldiers at the white and antique "Fortaleza de San Luis," and the sentries standing languidly but happily, with their bayonets smiling in the sun, and I saw the dreamy look in their eyes, though they were not dreaming of home. Drink, however, seems to be a strong temptation. I saw one never sober warrant officer who was drinking himself to death; an educated man, who boasted comically that he had been "exposed for two years to Cornell." America has not enforced the Dry Law in Domingo nor in Haiti. She has not suggested it in Cuba, though it holds in the zone of her territory in Panama and it has been hinted at in Northern Mexico.

The _fiesta_, however, means but little to the garrison. It means more to every one else than to them. Down below the earth bastion of the fortress and the deep gun emplacements foams the broad and fresh flowing Rio, and black and brown children are floating in it like luscious fruits, and there are crimson-foliaged trees beside the broad beach where scores of donkeys and ponies with panniers are waiting for water. Every pannier holds two petrol cans, and when the cans are filled the boys squat across them and beat the donkeys up the long hill to the town, and then hawk the water from street to street. Thus here, as in old Spain, water selling is a trade. And the ladies of the capital need water to wash off the dust, and the boys make double profits.

On all street corners the Dominican flag is flying, and a marvelous unwanted animation has possession of the people. Bands are playing; horns are being blown; halls are being festooned with flowers. Santiago begins to look a gay resort. Toledo in Spain has no cinema, but Santiago has two, with biseminal releases from New York and a fitting fade away for "Blood and Sin." Santiago has its shady and pleasant drinking saloons and "Eden" with its annex.

The male guests at night, wearing evening dress, or at least black coats and white ties, all look very dapper. The grown women look stupendous. Imagine them in strawberry pink, three times as stout as a stout woman, and with loose girdles about imaginary waists. But the young women, on the contrary, are slight, dainty, with latticed sleeves and jeweled bird combs in their hair.

They will dance till they drop, no matter what the heat. It is oppressive enough at eight, but the ball lasts till four in the morning, beginning very quietly with waltzes and ending with sex dances. At midnight the town orchestra gives way to a Cuban band which beats a tom-tom for hours. In comes the drum like a storm and then subsides, or it mounts upon the music like some big-cheeked black man getting upon an elephant in front of an army, while on each side of him are pagan heralds blowing dissonances on horns.

Next day after this orgy the faces of the women are a wreck, which no powder or cosmetic will disguise. Yet one of them told me that she belonged to a party club of thirty families where they took it in turn to invite all the others. "At my house I have a hundred and fifty guests, all day, all night," said she to me.

The _fiesta_, as in other Spanish countries, is a sort of national institution.

4

I was not fortunate enough to be present at a fête on the French part of the island--the Republic of Haiti--but I obtained the impression that the Haitians are much wilder than the Dominicans. The Negroes do not readily identify their needs, they are more ebullient, more pious, and I should say more haunted by a prehistoric past than are the Spaniards.

Nothing is more serene, more utterly sweet, than Mass as sung in the great Cathedral at Port au Prince. But the scene outside the Cathedral for a square mile is primitive in the extreme. It is like the low suburbs of Nizhni Novgorod in Fair time, massed together and increased.

Port au Prince is built widely on a sun-bathed strand, and looks more like a capital city than Santo Domingo. A few khaki-clad Americans meet the eye, but the black population is too striking for one to consider Americans long. It seems as if the peasantry swarms into the city every day to market their produce. And what a peasantry! It would be impossible to match them. They seem to have all the salient characteristics of the southern French and of the Africans also. Their old-world, alert, shrewd, rough-hewn faces, their wit and mirth, their clamorous noisy French patois, their gay cottons and classical faces, the frankly exposed bare breasts of the women, all these tell of a people of force.

Unfortunately, owing to the calling of "dry" American ships, there is a good deal of vice. Champagne is brought to the quay, and the thirsty, indiscriminate passengers and crew knock the tops off the bottles and pour it down their throats like lemonade. The concomitants of drunkenness are all at hand. Possibly in no port in the world will a man, will any man, receive such attentions from women, be he even a somber-visaged missionary. The black girls swarm about you and fight for you.

But this may be overlooked, though I am surprised the American authorities tolerate it. Probably the soldiers like it. But Haiti is sad because she is denied her liberty. The colored people all over the world have a legitimate pride in their two independent States--Liberia and Haiti. There is no reason why Haiti should not be left to govern herself according to her lights and temperament, no reason except that Haiti furnishes a new field for exploitation. It is a place in which a good deal of money could be made if the population could be tamed.

But the people are too numerous and too fierce--they are in a way indomitable. The French blood is vigorous in them. I venture to suggest that Haiti is not a practical possession for an idealistic democracy. The political conceptions on which America has grown will never be adopted by the black French.

5

The time came for me to move on from an extremely interesting island. I wished a passage to Vera Cruz or Jamaica or Colon, but the chance of small vessels sailing adventitiously seemed to determine my way. I went to Puerto Plata and thence to Santiago de Cuba, of Cortes' memory, city of which he was Mayor, city which provided much of the capital for his adventure to Mexico.

Here is Puerto Plata, on the northern shore of Santo Domingo, the Spanish-speaking part; Puerto Plata, the Plate port, a fine ocean harbor where no doubt rested often the treasure ships of the Plate Fleet. Here is the place, one of the places, but where--where are the galleons of Spain?

There stands the British steamer _Teviot_, loading tons of cigar tobacco for Marseilles, all astir with British sailors, while up at her masthead three green parrots are pecking at one another and conversing, or edging off along the taut ropes. Over beyond is the Yankee freighter _Dorothy_, attended by waist-naked Negroes and barges of fruit. A streaming smoke on the horizon and a long-distance hooting tells of an incoming hulk of the reappearing Hamburg-Amerika line. Two little Norwegian tramps have been and gone. The fast American mail steamer from New York will come gliding in to-morrow. Spanish cripples creep abroad the ships in the harbor to show their sores, their withered legs and arms; Spanish negro peddlers squat on the stone pier with bunches of mangoes, pineapples, and coconuts. The town grasshoppers come pottering along with their wooden boxes to black the boots of sailors, and all the English they know is "Wahn a shine?"

But the tall galleons and the flashing faces of Castile have vanished away like a mirage, like something unreal, that never was. So I sit in the port and wait. None of the ships will take me the way I want to go. The quickest and cheapest way to Mexico is, after all, via New York, I am told. And that is disconcerting. The galleons have all been sunk, and now one must go via New York.

But patience conquers civilization. A little Spanish boat at length appeared, a mere toy beside its neighbors in the harbor, but going in the same old way of Spanish ships, owned by a Cuban company, commercial as the rest, bearing no banner of Castile over the ocean, and yet Spanish enough, Spanish of to-day.

On this I made a romantic voyage to Cuba. I realized for a moment once more the glamour of the days of the Discoverers and the piratical pioneers. The sea was like velvet; the hazy mountains were of ineffable grandeur; the ship scarcely moved, yet went on, went on, and the flying-fish, silver and gleaming, raced us as she circuited and curved and planed o'er the ocean.

I voyaged with Fabio Fiallo, the poet and patriot of Santo Domingo, and he poured into my ears the story of his country's wrongs. He had with him a fierce-looking peasant from the interior, Cuyo Baez, who took off his shirt to show me the rose-red efflorescences and brutal channels on his body where red-hot irons had been applied to him by torturers.

It was like an inverted picture from Kingsley's _Westward Ho_, and for a moment I could fancy I saw a British sailor victim of the Spanish Inquisition. I looked at the fierce, unforgiving, taciturn Cuyo, and then at the fine cultured face of Fiallo. How it would have stirred the blood if Cuyo had been Anglo-Saxon and had been thus treated by Spaniards! For our noble rage has an ignoble appetite--it feeds on atrocities, must have atrocities. But here was a Spaniard, alleged to have been tortured with hot irons by one of us, by an Anglo-Saxon. It was incredible.

Fabio Fiallo looked down into the depths of the tranquil sea and meditated, as if he were looking for the Spanish ships and Spaniards down below, and their banners and their crosses and the spoils of the Indies. He could not see them. He could only see the sharks following the boat.

The sailors came out with pistols and began shooting at sharks. For when one shark gets killed the others feed on it and cease following the ship for a while. But it does not disturb the poet, nor the imperturbable Baez. They are thinking of all that is Spanish, hating all that is American, and they are sailing over the sea to stir up the Cubans and eventually to stir up Washington. Cuyo Baez will show his mutilated body to many, and whether he was actually tortured by Anglo-Saxon or by one of Spanish blood, he inevitably will rouse passion and malice against the starry banner of the North.

The ship glides on, leaves Haiti, crosses the Windward Passage, labors through a long noontide over little waves, and in the afternoon comes "unto a land in which it seemed always afternoon." And I went up into the peak of the prow of the ship and it ceased to be on a Cuban merchant-man. I had raised one of the lost galleons, and behind me were no moderns but the clamorous, audacious mariners of the first days of the New World.

The treasure ship drifts westward on a merely dimpled sea, and in the evening comes to the shelter of Cape Maysi. The sun sets in a lake of fire, and we traverse shadows of cloudlets instead of waves; and the shadows are blue and then peacock blue with black circulating lines, like cobra's eyes, and then blood red, and then red gelatine and then green. And from where in the mountains the sun made a lake of fire, a marvelous red brilliance has been enkindled and great black radii shoot outward across bands of red glowing burning color. It is a dreadful and grandiose scene, the surface of the sea so calm and yet possessed of fast-wandering, circulating, wallowing color reflections--the place of actual sunset meanwhile, far o'er the waves, made gigantic and romantic by the great black spokes of a wheel that is rolling through illimitable fires.

And the treasure ship in the enchanted twilight goes on, goes on, with all the pulse of Castile behind it.