They made the voyage in thirty-two hours, but as the slaves were ill, after the invariable habit of their colour, Rachael had little respite from her baby, or Hamilton from Alexander, whose restless legs and enterprising mind kept him in constant motion; and the day began at five o'clock. There was no opportunity for conversation, and Hamilton was grateful to the miserable mustees. He had the tact to let his wife readjust herself to her damaged idols without weak excuses and a pleading which would have distressed her further, but he was glad to be spared intimate conversation with her. As they sailed into the bright green waters before Frederikstadt, the sun blazed down upon the white town on the white plain with a vicious energy which Rachael had never seen on Nevis during the hottest and most silent months of the year. She closed her eyes and longed for the cool shallows of the harbour, and even Alexander ceased to watch the flying fish dart like silver blades over the water, and was glad to be stowed comfortably into one of the little deck-houses. As for the slaves, weakened by illness, they wept and refused to gather themselves together. But Rachael's soul, which had felt faint for many days, rose triumphant in the face of this last affliction. Like all West Indians, she hated extreme heat, and during those months on her own Islands when the trades hibernated, rarely left the house. She remembered little of St. Croix. Her imagination had disassociated itself from all connected with it, but now it burst into hideous activity and pictured interminable years of scorching heat and blinding glare. For a moment she descended to the verge of hysteria, from which she struggled with so mighty an effort that it vitalized her spirit for the ordeal of her new life; and when Hamilton, cursing himself, came to assist her to land, she was able to remark that she recalled the beauty of Christianstadt, and to anathematize her sea-green maids. The trail of Spain is over all the islands, and on St. Croix has left its picturesque mark in the heavy arcades which front the houses in the towns. Behind these arcades one can pass from street to street with brief egress into the awful downpour of the sun, and they give to both towns an effect of architectural beauty. At that time palms and cocoanuts grew in profusion along the streets of Frederikstadt and in the gardens, tempering the glare of the sun on the coral.