As I have said, Alfonso was very black, and Alfonso was very dignified.  But his blackness, compared with the blackness of the pilot who came off at St. George’s Island, and piloted us through the Narrows, was as that of a kid shoe to a boot that has been polished by blacking.  As to dignity, no comparison can be made.  The dignity of that nigger pilot exceeded anything, regal, municipal, or even parochial, that I have ever seen.  As he came up the ship’s side, Dennis was looking over it, and when the pilot stood on deck Dennis fled abruptly, and Alister declares it took two buckets of water to recover him from the fit of hysterics in which he found him rolling in the forecastle.

The pilot’s costume bore even more reference to his dignity than to the weather.  He wore a pea-coat, a tall and very shiny black hat, white trousers, and neither shoes nor socks.  His feet were like flat-irons turned the wrong way, and his legs seemed to be slipped into the middle of them, like the handles of two queer-shaped hoes.  His intense, magnificent importance, and the bombastic way he swaggered about the deck, were so perfectly absurd, that we three youngsters should probably have never had any feeling towards him but that of contempt, if it had not been that we were now quite enough of seamen to appreciate the skill with which he took us safely on our dangerous and intricate passage into harbour.  How we ever got through the Narrows, how he picked our way amongst the reefs and islands, was a marvel.  We came in so close to shore that I thought we must strike every instant, and so we should have done had there been any blundering on his part.

We went very slowly that day, as became the atmosphere and the scene, the dangers of our way, and the dignity of our guide.

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” said Dennis, as we hung over the side.  “If it’s for repairs we’ve put into Paradise, long life to the old tub and her rotten timbers!  I wouldn’t have missed this for a lady’s berth in the West Indian Mail, and my passage paid!”

“Nor I.”

“Nor I.”

This was indeed worth having gone through a good deal to see.  The channel through which we picked our way was marked out by little buoys, half white and half black, and on either side the coral was just awash.  Close at hand the water was emerald green or rosy purple, according to its depth and the growths below; half-a-mile away it was deep blue against lines of dazzling surf and coral sand; and the reefs and rocks amongst whose deadly edges our hideous pilot steered for our lives, were like beds of flowers blooming under water.  Red, purple, yellow, orange, pale green, dark green, in patches quite milky, and in patches a mass of all sorts of sea-weed, a gay garden on a white ground, shimmering through crystal!  And down below the crabs crawled about, and the fishes shot hither and thither; and over the surface of the water, from reef to reef and island to island, the tern and sea-gulls skimmed and swooped about.