The first of Trinity Islands heaved before them quite abruptly when they had traversed the channel. The land seemed to have been petrified in the act of leaping up to meet them. I think the wind had changed upon it at a moment of grotesque contortion. My nurse used always to warn me that this climatic change might fatally occur when my anatomical experiments became more than usually daring. Green woods had veiled the harsh shapes of the hills. Palms waved their spread hands upon the sky-line. A tangle of green things tumbled to the water’s edge. Far away to the right a faint blessing of pearl-coloured smoke and a few diamonds flung among the velvet slopes of the hills hinted at the watching windows of Port of the West. Shipping clustered confidentially together on either side of the _Caribbeania_, like gossips commenting jealously on the arrival of a princess of their kind. The entering liner shook out little waves like messages to alight on the calm shore. The whole scene looked too heavy to be painted on the delicate sea. It was absurd to think that that pale opal floor should be trodden by the rusty tramp-steamers, the tall red-and-black sailing ships, the panting tugs, the blunt and bloated coal-tenders laden with compressed niggerhood. There were broadheaded catfish, and groping jellyfish in the water, and they alone looked fashioned from and throughout eternity for the tender element that framed them. The suffragette, who had risen from her berth, contrary to the advice of Courtesy and of the doctor, looked at the first of Trinity Islands with her soul in her eyes and a compressed adoration in her breast. For there was a silver sea, silver mist enclosing the island, and a silver shore shining through the mist. Silver, of course, is idealised grey—grey with the memory of black and white refined away. Silver is the halo of a snake-soul. The day was mapped out in so many ways by the different passengers of the _Caribbeania_, that, from their prophetic descriptions, you could hardly recognise it as the same slice out of eternity. There were globe-trotters, eager to trot this tiny section of the globe in hired motor-cars, others anxious to buy souvenirs in Port of the West all day, others nervously determined to call upon the Governor in search of a Vice-regal luncheon, others without imagination desirous of fishing for catfish from the poop, and a very few who dared to avow their intention of spending the day in absorbing cold drinks on the verandah of the King’s Garden Hotel. In theory the gardener wished to lie upon a chair on the shady side of the deck, with a handkerchief over his face all day. Such a course would have been flattering to his dignity and to his worship of aloofness. In practice his unquenchable energy and that of the suffragette were too much for him. He was vividly stirred by the strange land. The clawlike hands of the palms beckoned him.