body without thinking of making one modification from neck to
heel. "Frugal diet is the cause of this physical condition," a
young French professor assures me; "all these men," he says,
"live upon salt codfish and fruit." But frugal living alone could
never produce such symmetry and saliency of muscles: race-
crossing, climate, perpetual exercise, healthy labor--many
conditions must have combined to cause it. Also it is certain
that this tropical sun has a tendency to dissolve spare flesh, to
melt away all superfluous tissue, leaving the muscular fibre
dense and solid as mahogany.

At the _mouillage_, below a green _morne_, is the bathing-
place. A rocky beach rounding away under heights of tropical
wood;--palms curving out above the sand, or bending half-way
across it. Ships at anchor in blue water, against golden-yellow
horizon. A vast blue glow. Water clear as diamond, and lukewarm.

It is about one hour after sunrise; and the high parts of
Montaigne Pelée are still misty blue. Under the
palms and among the lava rocks, and also in little cabins
farther up the slope, bathers are dressing or undressing: the
water is also dotted with heads of swimmers. Women and girls
enter it well robed from feet to shoulders;--men go in very
sparsely clad;--there are lads wearing nothing. Young boys--
yellow and brown little fellows--run in naked, and swim out to
pointed rocks that jut up black above the bright water. They
climb up one at a time to dive down. Poised for the leap upon
the black lava crag, and against the blue light of the sky, each
lithe figure, gilded by the morning sun, has a statuesqueness and
a luminosity impossible to paint in words. These bodies seem to