“Exactly!” I said. “Here you have the paradise, the Eden of the Pacific. Politics will supply the serpent.” He shook his head and smiled, and I went away without telling him that I had travelled from Chicago with a gentleman who had been to Washington to see about the introduction of that self-same serpent. * * * * * When people who have not been there read about the tropics in books, especially in story-books, the impression they get is one of general gorgeousness pervading the heavens and the earth, and a human state of things not far removed from what some of us honestly hope to deserve some day when days have ceased to count. Blue seas lie rippling gently under azure skies; islands of almost inconceivable beauty, palm-crowned and coral-fringed, gem the surface of the waveless waters. The heat of the sun is tempered by cool, scented breezes. The day begins and ends with sunrises and sunsets which seem like the opening and shutting of the gates of Paradise. The nights are languorous dreams of soft delights under skies spangled with myriads of stars such as northern eyes have never seen. On other nights earth and sea are bathed in silvery moonlight such as never fell on northern sea or shore. Some authors get their moon and stars shining at the same time. These have probably done their travelling in an armchair. Diana of the Tropics is a good deal too autocratic for that. Those are the tropics of the novelist and the traveller who wants to make his untravelled readers envious. As a story-writer I have myself sinned thus; wherefore, partly, this confession. The trouble with most people who have described the tropics in fiction and otherwise is that they leave too much out. All that they put in is correct. You really can see all these beauties, and more, between Cancer and Capricorn; but you don’t see them everywhere or all the time. Another very serious fault with your tropical word-artist is that he generally ignores the swamps, the fevers, the agues, the rains which come down like bursting water-spouts, the hurricanes which blow brick and stone walls about as if they were paper. Further, as to the rippling sunlit sea, they too often omit to state that, when it is inclined that way it can get up into waves which will take a ship clean over a reef and land it halfway up a hillside, and that it has a swell through which a ship may wallow for days, rolling scuppers under every minute of the day and night for weeks on end. This, by the way, is one of the most villainous features of the tropical Pacific. For instance, you wake up out of a nightmare-slumber, bruised and sore and sweating, after hours of sleepy struggle to brace yourself somehow between the sides of your berth so that you may not be flung against the opposite side of your cabin. You watch for a favourable moment—the best one is just when she is going to stop and your side is down. Miss this, and you’ll wish you’d waited for the next.