CHAPTER XI
WINDS OF CHANCE
Long that night the boy lay, couched on his bed of fern, and watched the gold and purple cyclorama of the night wheel over the coronals of the palms. Leagues to the North a girl sat, draped in a blue and white counterpane, listening to the ticking of the old Seth Thomas in the hall, and wished she could cry herself to sleep.
But the voyage of the bottle had begun—the tiniest of objects to outwit Fate, or else to consummate his plans.
Flowing in from the Atlantic, the ocean currents and their sighing overtones, the winds, bore it on and on to the West, past storied islands, like jewels adorning the burnished breastplate of the sea, some crowned with massive overhanging mountains, others nestling low on the waters, rich with fertile plantations and white-walled, red-roofed towns, steeped in molten sunshine, and slumbering 'neath royal palms—picturesque, unsewered, full of white palaces and mired, insect-ridden slums, yet all beautiful to look at from the sea, for the fairest hues are often born out of corruption.
Now the bottle was almost caught and churned to pieces in the swirl from a fruit-steamer's screw. Near St. Kitts, a gaudily-painted pleasure craft hove in sight; a mulatto's
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