Some few years ago--to be precise, it was during the summer of 1903--I
was paying what must have seemed like an interminable visit to my old
friend John Saunders, who at that time filled with becoming dignity the
high-sounding office of Secretary to the Treasury of His Majesty's
Government, in the quaint little town of Nassau, in the island of New
Providence, one of those Bahama Islands that lie half lost to the world
to the southeast of the Caribbean Sea and form a somewhat neglected
portion of the British West Indies.

Time was when they had a sounding name for themselves in the world;
during the American Civil War, for instance, when the blockade-runners
made their dare-devil trips with contraband cotton, between Nassau and
South Carolina; and before that again, when the now sleepy little
harbour gave shelter to rousing freebooters and tarry pirates, tearing
in there under full sail with their loot from the Spanish Main. How
often those quiet moonlit streets must have roared with brutal revelry,
and the fierce clamour of pistol-belted scoundrels round the wine-casks
have gone up into the still, tropic night.

But those heroic days are gone, and Nassau is given up to a sleepy trade
in sponges and tortoise-shell, and peace is no name for the drowsy tenor
of the days under the palm trees and the scarlet poincianas. A little
group of Government buildings surrounding a miniature statue of Queen
Victoria, flanked by some old Spanish cannon and murmured over by the
foliage of tropic trees, gives an air of old-world distinction to the
long Bay street, whose white houses, with their jalousied verandas, ran
the whole length of the water-front, and all the long sunny days the air
is lazy with the sound of the shuffling feet of the child-like "darky"
population and the chatter of the bean-pods of the poincianas overhead.