Pieces of Eight | Page 3

New Providence, Bahama Islands._
Some few years ago--to be precise, it was during the summer of 1903--I
was paying what must have seemed like an interminable visit to my old
friend John Saunders, who at that time filled with becoming dignity the
high-sounding office of Secretary to the Treasury of His Majesty's
Government, in the quaint little town of Nassau, in the island of New
Providence, one of those Bahama Islands that lie half lost to the world
to the southeast of the Caribbean Sea and form a somewhat neglected
portion of the British West Indies.
Time was when they had a sounding name for themselves in the world;
during the American Civil War, for instance, when the
blockade-runners made their dare-devil trips with contraband cotton,

between Nassau and South Carolina; and before that again, when the
now sleepy little harbour gave shelter to rousing freebooters and tarry
pirates, tearing in there under full sail with their loot from the Spanish
Main. How often those quiet moonlit streets must have roared with
brutal revelry, and the fierce clamour of pistol-belted scoundrels round
the wine-casks have gone up into the still, tropic night.
But those heroic days are gone, and Nassau is given up to a sleepy trade
in sponges and tortoise-shell, and peace is no name for the drowsy
tenor of the days under the palm trees and the scarlet poincianas. A
little group of Government buildings surrounding a miniature statue of
Queen Victoria, flanked by some old Spanish cannon and murmured
over by the foliage of tropic trees, gives an air of old-world distinction
to the long Bay street, whose white houses, with their jalousied
verandas, ran the whole length of the water-front, and all the long
sunny days the air is lazy with the sound of the shuffling feet of the
child-like "darky" population and the chatter of the bean-pods of the
poincianas overhead.
Here a handful of Englishmen, clothed in the white linen suits of the
tropics, carry on the Government after the traditional manner of British
colonies from time immemorial, each of them, like my friend, not
without an English smile at the humour of the thing, supporting the
dignity of offices with impressive names--Lord Chief Justice, Attorney
General, Speaker of the House, Lord High Admiral, Colonial Secretary
and so forth--and occasionally a figure in gown and barrister's wig flits
across the green from the little courthouse, where the Lord Chief
Justice in his scarlet robes, on a dais surmounted by a gilded lion and
unicorn, sustains the majesty of British justice, with all the pomp of
Westminster or Whitehall.
My friend the Secretary of the Treasury is a man possessing in an
uncommon degree that rare and most attractive of human qualities,
companionableness. He is a quiet man of middle age, an old
white-headed bachelor with a droll twinkling expression, speaking
seldom, and then in a curious silent fashion, as though the drowsy heat
of the tropics had soaked him through and through. With his white hair,

his white clothes, his white moustachios, his white eyelashes, over eyes
that seem to hide away among quiet mirthful wrinkles, he carries about
him the sort of silence that goes with a miller, surrounded by the white
dusty quiet of his mill.
As we sit together in the hush of his snuggery of an evening,
surrounded by guns, fishing-lines, and old prints, there are times when
we scarcely exchange a dozen words between dinner and bed-time, and
yet we have all the time a keen and satisfying sense of companionship.
It is John Saunders's gift. Companionship seems quietly to ooze out of
him, without the need of words. He and you are there in your
comfortable arm-chairs, with a good cigar, a whisky-and-soda, or a
glass of that old port on which he prides himself, and that is all that is
necessary. Where is the need of words?
And occasionally, we have, as third in those evening conclaves, a big
slow-smiling, broad-faced young merchant, of the same kidney. In he
drops with a nod and a smile, selects his cigar and his glass, and takes
his place in the smoke-cloud of our meditations, radiating, without the
effort of speech, that good thing--humanity; though one must not forget
the one subject on which now and again the good Charlie Webster
achieves eloquence in spite of himself--duck-shooting. That is the only
subject worth breaking the pleasant brotherhood of silence for.
John Saunders's subject is shark-fishing. Duck-shooting and
shark-fishing. It is enough. Here, for sensible men, is a sufficient basis
for life-long friendship, and unwearying, inexhaustible companionship.
It was in this peace of John Saunders's snuggery, one July evening, in
1903, the three of us being duly met, and ensconced in our respective
arm-chairs, that we got on to the subject of buried