Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/94

Rh had a pretty effect. But palms are not half so beautiful as elms. In a landscape they are ineffective.

Mr. Randolph lived like an English nobleman, but he was no more cheerful than the rest of them. He knew how to give a dinner. London could not have given us a better one. People who live in quiet, remote places are apt to give good dinners. They are the oft-recurring excitement of an otherwise unemotional, dull existence. They linger, each of these dinners, in our palimpsest memories, each recorded clearly, so that it does not blot out the other. Mr. Randolph had travelled extensively. He was a "London swell" condemned to an existence in this remote corner. But then he had a French cook from the "Trois Frères Provençaux," a keenly developed sense of gastronomy, and plenty of money. Given these three things, "avec cette sauce," and one could give a dinner in the desert.

"Oh, what a good dinner we have eaten, and what cigars we are smoking!" whispered my husband to me as he came in furtively to bring me my fan and handkerchief; and then he returned to the moonlighted veranda, in the shade, to look at the tropical night and to imbibe the fine old Santa Cruz rum and water. The time came for us to depart, and we drove home in the tropical moonlight, my husband holding a parasol over my head — in that superb moonlight, so soft and clear. Why? Randolph had told him to do so, he said, else I should have a swollen face, which would not become a bride.

"Randolph thinks the moon particularly dangerous, not only to one's brain, but to one's personal beauty," said he; "and what stories they tell of centipeds and the poison fish, the barracouta and the moon!"

Our next fine dinner was at Government House. There we had an exact copy of what such a feast would