BOOK I

    Out of the constant East the breeze
      Brings morning, like a wafted rose,
        Across the glimmering lagoon,
    And wakes the still palmetto trees,
    And blows adrift the phantom moon,
      That paler and still paler glows—­
    Up with the anchor! let’s be going! 
    O hoist the sail! and let’s be going! 
      Glory and glee
      Of the morning sea—­
    Ah! let’s be going!

    Under our keel a glass of dreams
      Still fairer than the morning sky,
        A jewel shot with blue and gold,
    The swaying clearness streams and gleams,
        A crystal mountain smoothly rolled
      O’er magic gardens flowing by—­
    Over we go the sea-fans waving,
      Over the rainbow corals paving
        The deep-sea floor;
        No more, no more
        Would I seek the shore
      To make my grave in—­
    O sea-fans waving!

PIECES OF EIGHT

CHAPTER I

Introduces the Secretary to the Treasury of His Britannic Majesty’s Government at Nassau, New Providence, Bahama Islands.

Some few years ago—­to be precise, it was during the summer of 1903—­I was paying what must have seemed like an interminable visit to my old friend John Saunders, who at that time filled with becoming dignity the high-sounding office of Secretary to the Treasury of His Majesty’s Government, in the quaint little town of Nassau, in the island of New Providence, one of those Bahama Islands that lie half lost to the world to the southeast of the Caribbean Sea and form a somewhat neglected portion of the British West Indies.

Time was when they had a sounding name for themselves in the world; during the American Civil War, for instance, when the blockade-runners made their dare-devil trips with contraband cotton, between Nassau and South Carolina; and before that again, when the now sleepy little harbour gave shelter to rousing freebooters and tarry pirates, tearing in there under full sail with their loot from the Spanish Main.  How often those quiet moonlit streets must have roared with brutal revelry, and the fierce clamour of pistol-belted scoundrels round the wine-casks have gone up into the still, tropic night.

But those heroic days are gone, and Nassau is given up to a sleepy trade in sponges and tortoise-shell, and peace is no name for the drowsy tenor of the days under the palm trees and the scarlet poincianas.  A little group of Government buildings surrounding a miniature statue of Queen Victoria, flanked by some old Spanish cannon and murmured over by the foliage of tropic trees, gives an air of old-world distinction to the long Bay street, whose white houses, with their jalousied verandas, ran the whole length of the water-front, and all the long sunny days the air is lazy with the sound of the shuffling feet of the child-like “darky” population and the chatter of the bean-pods of the poincianas overhead.