Down by the sea is the red fort, built on a bluff, and commanding a harbour beautiful to look upon, with its wooded island, its sharp high points, its sombre swamps covered with lacing mangroves, but locked from all the world but that which can come in sailing ships, by the coral reef on which so many craft have gone to pieces.

From Alexander’s high window in Thomas Mitchell’s house, he could see the lively Park behind the Fort; the boats sail over from the blue peaks of St. Thomas and St. John, the long white line of the sounding reef.  Above the walls of Government House was the high bold curve of the mountain with its dazzling facades, its glitter of green.  In the King Street of that day gentlemen in knee breeches and lace shirts, their hair in a powdered queue, were as familiar objects as turbaned blacks and Danes in uniform.  After riding over their plantations “to hear the cane grow,” they almost invariably brought up in town to talk over prospects with the merchants, or to meet each other at some more jovial resort.  Sometimes they came clattering down the long road in a coach and four, postilions shouting at the pic’nees in the road, swerving, and halting so suddenly in some courtyard, that only a planter, accustomed to this emotional method of travel, could keep his seat.  Ordinarily he preferred his horse, perhaps because it told no tales.

Thomas Mitchell had made his large fortune in the traffic of slaves, and was on terms of doubtful courtesy with Peter Lytton, who disapproved the industry.  Blacks were by no means his only source of revenue; he had one of the two large general stores of the Island—­the other was Nicholas Cruger’s—­and plantations of cane, whose yield in sugar, molasses, and rum never failed him.  He was not a pleasing man in his family, and did not extend the hospitality of its roof to Alexander with a spontaneous warmth.  His own children were married, and he did not look back upon the era of mischievous boys with sufficient enthusiasm to prompt him to adopt another.  He yielded to his wife’s voluble supplications because domestic harmony was necessary to his content, and Mistress Mitchell had her ways of upsetting it.  Alexander was immediately too busy with his studies to pay attention to the indifferent grace with which Mr. Mitchell accepted his lot, and, fortunately, this industrious merchant was much away from home.  Hugh Knox, as the surest means of diverting the boy from his grief, put him at his books the day after he arrived in Christianstadt.  His own house was on Company Street, near the woods out of which the town seemed to spring; and in his cool library he gathered his boys daily, and crammed their brains with Latin and mathematics.  The boys had met at Peter Lytton’s before, but Knox easily persuaded them to the new arrangement, which was as grateful to him—­he was newly married—­as to Alexander.  When the lessons were over he gave his favourite pupil a book and an easy-chair, or made