"Qualis Natura formatrix, si talis formata? Oh my God, how fair must be Thy real world, if even Thy phantoms are so fair!""Phantoms?" asked Amyas, uneasily."That's no ghost, Frank, but a jolly little honey-sucker, with a wee wife, and children no bigger than peas, but yet solid greedy little fellows enough, I'll warrant.""Not phantoms in thy sense, good fellow, but in the sense of those who know the worthlessness of all below.""I'll tell you what, brother Frank, you are a great deal wiser than me, I know; but I can't abide to see you turn up your nose as it were at God's good earth.See now, God made all these things; and never a man, perhaps, set eyes on them till fifty years agone; and yet they were as pretty as they are now, ever since the making of the world.And why do you think God could have put them here, then, but to please Himself"--and Amyas took off his hat--"with the sight of them? Now, I say, brother Frank, what's good enough to please God, is good enough to please you and me.""Your rebuke is just, dear old simple-hearted fellow; and God forgive me, if with all my learning, which has brought me no profit, and my longings, which have brought me no peace, I presume at moments, sinner that I am, to be more dainty than the Lord Himself.He walked in Paradise among the trees of the garden, Amyas; and so will we, and be content with what He sends.Why should we long for the next world, before we are fit even for this one?""And in the meanwhile," said Amyas, "this earth's quite good enough, at least here in Barbados.""Do you believe," asked Frank, trying to turn his own thoughts, "in those tales of the Spaniards, that the Sirens and Tritons are heard singing in these seas?""I can't tell.There's more fish in the water than ever came out of it, and more wonders in the world, I'll warrant, than we ever dreamt of; but I was never in these parts before; and in the South Sea, I must say, I never came across any, though Yeo says he has heard fair music at night up in the Gulf, far away from land.""The Spaniards report that at certain seasons choirs of these nymphs assemble in the sea, and with ravishing music sing their watery loves.It may be so.For Nature, which has peopled the land with rational souls, may not have left the sea altogether barren of them; above all, when we remember that the ocean is as it were the very fount of all fertility, and its slime (as the most learned hold with Thales of Miletus) that prima materia out of which all things were one by one concocted.Therefore, the ancients feigned wisely that Venus, the mother of all living things, whereby they designed the plastic force of nature, was born of the sea-foam, and rising from the deep, floated ashore upon the isles of Greece.""I don't know what plastic force is; but I wish I had had the luck to be by when the pretty poppet came up: however, the nearest thing I ever saw to that was maidens swimming alongside of us when we were in the South Seas, and would have come aboard, too; but Drake sent them all off again for a lot of naughty packs, and I verily believe they were no better.Look at the butterflies, now! Don't you wish you were a boy again, and not too proud to go catching them in your cap?"And so the two wandered on together through the glorious tropic woods, and then returned to the beach to find the sick already grown cheerful, and many who that morning could not stir from their hammocks, pacing up and down, and gaining strength with every step.
"Well done, lads!" cried Amyas, "keep a cheerful mind.We will have the music ashore after dinner, for want of mermaids to sing to us, and those that can dance may."And so those four days were spent; and the men, like schoolboys on a holiday, gave themselves up to simple merriment, not forgetting, however, to wash the clothes, take in fresh water, and store up a good supply of such fruit as seemed likely to keep; until, tired with fruitless rambles after gold, which they expected to find in every bush, in spite of Yeo's warnings that none had been heard of on the island, they were fain to lounge about, full-grown babies, picking up shells and sea-fans to take home to their sweethearts, smoking agoutis out of the hollow trees, with shout and laughter, and tormenting every living thing they could come near, till not a land-crab dare look out of his hole, or an armadillo unroll himself, till they were safe out of the bay, and off again to the westward, unconscious pioneers of all the wealth, and commerce, and beauty, and science which has in later centuries made that lovely isle the richest gem of all the tropic seas.
