girl had learned nothing, she had never listened to a general
conversation, she knew nothing, she had heard of nothing. She
could read certainly; but all the reading matter that ever came in
her way were the newspapers provided for the captains' room of the
"store." Jacobus had the habit of taking these sheets home now and
then in a very stained and ragged condition.

As her mind could not grasp the meaning of any matters treated
there except police-court reports and accounts of crimes, she had
formed for herself a notion of the civilised world as a scene of
murders, abductions, burglaries, stabbing affrays, and every sort
of desperate violence. England and France, Paris and London (the
only two towns of which she seemed to have heard), appeared to her
sinks of abomination, reeking with blood, in contrast to her little
island where petty larceny was about the standard of current
misdeeds, with, now and then, some more pronounced crime--and that
only amongst the imported coolie labourers on sugar estates or the
negroes of the town. But in Europe these things were being done
daily by a wicked population of white men amongst whom, as that
ruffianly, aristocratic old Miss Jacobus pointed out, the wandering
sailors, the associates of her precious papa, were the lowest of
the low.

It was impossible to give her a sense of proportion. I suppose she
figured England to herself as about the size of the Pearl of the
Ocean; in which case it would certainly have been reeking with gore
and a mere wreck of burgled houses from end to end. One could not
make her understand that these horrors on which she fed her
imagination were lost in the mass of orderly life like a few drops
of blood in the ocean. She directed upon me for a moment the