besides the advisability of placing an extra guard over the money boxes
whilst they were in port. Most of these men who surged before him were
merchants of the first rank or the representatives of others as
important,--captains of large ships and their mates. The last sauntered
and cursed the heat, which was infernal; but the merchants moved rapidly
from one business house to another, or talked in groups, under the
tamarind trees, of the great interests which brought them to the Indies.
Upon the inherent characteristics which their faces expressed were
superimposed the different seals of those acquired,--shrewdness,
suspicion, a hawk-like alertness, the greed of acquisition. Alexander,
with something like terror of the future, reflected that there was not
one of these men he cared to know. He knew there were far greater cities
than the busy little _entrepôt_ of the West Indies, but he rightly
doubted if he ever should see again so cosmopolitan a mob, a more picked
assortment of representative types. Not one looked as if he remembered
his wife and children, his creed, or the art and letters of his land.
They were a sweating, cursing, voluble, intriguing, greedy lot,
picturesque to look upon, profitable to study, calculated to rouse in a
boy of intellectual passions a fury of final resentment against the
meannesses of commercial life. Alexander jerked his shoulders with
disgust and moved slowly down the street. After he had reflected that
great countries involved great ideas, and that there was no place for
either political or moral ideals in an isolated and purely commercial
town like little Charlotte Amalie, he recovered his poise, and lent
himself to his surroundings again with considerable philosophy.

He had almost crossed the foot of the third hill when he turned
abruptly into a large store, unlike any he had seen. It was full of
women, splendid creatures, who were bargaining with merchants' clerks
for the bales of fine stuffs which had been opened for the display of