"They're laughing in New York because it gets dark so early in the afternoon. It's fun to tumble in the snow in the early afternoon twilight. But they won't laugh in another week or two. The blessed sunlight for New York is almost gone. Shorter days--still shorter--until soon there will be no day at all! "Our huge cities here in the north, all buried in the snow and ice and darkness of a polar winter! The greatest catastrophe in the history of the world--we're facing it now! No power on earth can help us to escape it, for it's inevitable!" CHAPTER II THE WHITE GIRL IN THE MOONLIGHT The plantations of the Cains in Porto Rico lay back from the north coast, some thirty kilometers from San Juan. Bisected by the railroad and by the main auto road, they spread green and fragrant in the vivid sunlight. Rows of orange and grapefruit trees, stretching over the undulating sand, with pineapples between the rows of trees. Here and there, thickets of banana trees, encouraged to grow and break the force of the trade wind from the sea; a tall spreading mango--a sapling perhaps back in the almost forgotten days when Spain ruled this island; clumps, occasionally, of giant coconuts rising on the low hillsides; trees with smooth brown trunks and feather-duster tops, the trunks all bent backward from the coast by the wind. The main auto road, lined with its majestic royal palms, was oily black and sometimes very noisy; the railroad with its metal ties was a dark streak like a double pencil line amid the green of the trees. But the plantation crossroads were white ribbons of sand in the sunlight, and whiter still at night, under the white glory of the moon. It was then--at night--that the magic romance of the tropics was to me always most poignant. At sundown the brisk trades were stilled. A quiet, brooding somnolence fell upon everything. The native shacks, palm-thatched, burned brown by the sun, turned darkly mysterious. Off beyond the distant coast, as it showed from the commanding height of the Cains' veranda, the sea at night was dimly purple under a gem-studded purple sky; and sometimes the moon-beams shimmered off there in the silent magic darkness. The scent of the orange blossoms hung heavy in the still air, exotic, stirring the fancy to a million half formed dreams that one may tell but never express. Upon the highest knoll--an eminence of perhaps a hundred feet--stood the Cains' plantation house. A white road led up the slope to it. A broad, spreading frame bungalow, with a peaked tin roof, and a wide flat veranda around three of its sides, with coconut posts set at intervals. A bunch of bananas always hung there, ripening; a box, lying against the house wall, was filled with oranges at intervals by a native boy.