Cookie over his dishpan flinging it back in a tremendous basso.
Cookie was the noble youth's only musical rival, and when he had
finished his work we would invite him to join us at the fire and
regale us with plantation melodies and camp-meeting hymns. The
negro's melodious thunder mingled with the murmur of wind and wave
like a kindred note, and the strange plaintive rhythm of his
artless songs took one back and back, far up the stream of life,
until a fire upon a beach seemed one's ancestral hearth and home.

I realized that life on Leeward Island might rapidly become a
process of reversion.




VII

A BABBIT'S FOOT

It was fortunate that Cookie knew nothing of the solitary grave
somewhere on the island, with its stone marked with B. H. and a
cross-bones, nor that the inhabitant thereof was supposed to walk.
If he had, I think the strange spectacle of a lone negro in a small
boat rowing lustily for the American continent might soon have been
witnessed on the Pacific by any eyes that were there to see. And
we could ill have spared either boat or cook.

Yet even though unvexed by this gruesome knowledge, after two or
three days I noticed that Cookie was ill at ease. As the leisure
member of the party, I enjoyed more of Cookie's society than the