Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/93

70 ages of the ants. They had eaten away the whole interior of the wood which had supported his astronomical instruments, and he had these mounted on iron ploughshares and broken bits of sugar-boilers. We often heard these ant ravages alluded to, and afterwards we saw a colony of them deliberately strip off their wings and worm their way into a wooden wall in Mr. Hawley's house. Sometimes the leg of a table would go down unexpectedly and reveal a hollow inside; they had entirely eaten out the heart of the wood.

Most of the houses at which we visited were monuments of past prosperity, where poverty was bravely and silently borne. They were, many of them, full of learning and refinement, full of dramatic secrets. It was the veriest atmosphere for the novelist. No one knew anything about Time. He had never crossed over from St. Thomas, the old thief Time! Having no seasons, it was always summer — "sacred, high, eternal noon." These West-Indians never said "last autumn," "last winter." They had none of these reminders; so the growth of children was their only calendar. Their newspapers were a fortnight old, and nobody read them but the planters, and they not often. A newspaper is of no interest unless you read one every day. One must keep hold of Time.

The day came when we were to dine at Mr. Randolph's, and the rich English planter received us in a beautiful, well-kept house. Fortune had not gone hard with him. We drove thither by the sea over one or two gentle elevations, seeing St. Thomas and Porto Rico — very dimly the last, but dreamy and delicious. The plantations looked, each with its negro huts about it, like little towns; and the long, smooth, white roads, planted with palm-trees like long zones of umbrellas,