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That honeymoon among the islands was so replete with beauty and bliss and the fulfilment of every romantic and ardent dream, that when it was finished it was almost a relief to Anne to adjust her faculties to the homely details of housekeeping. For two months they wandered amongst that chain of enchanted islands set in a summer sea, the sympathetic trade winds filling their sails and tempering the heat on shore.
St. Thomas with its little city on three hills like a painted fairy tale; St. Croix with its old Spanish arcades and palm avenues; the red-roofed Dutch village in the green crater of St. Bartholomew, which shot straight out of the sea without a hand's width of shore; Antigua with its English landscapes and tropical hospitality; St. Lucia, looking like an exploded mountain chain, that had caught the bright plains and forests of another island while the earth was in its throes, green as a shattered emerald by day, flaming with the long torches of gigantic fireflies by night; St. Vincent with its smoking volcanoes and rich plantations; Martinique, that bit of old France, with its almost perpendicular flights of street-steps cut in the rock, lined with ancient houses; beautiful honey-coloured women always passing up and down with tall jars or baskets on their stately heads; Dominica, with its rugged mountains, roaring cataracts, and brilliant verdure; Trinidad, with its terrible cliffs, infinitely coloured valleys, mountain masses; its groves of citron, and hedges of scarlet hybiscus and white hydrangea, towns set in the green amphitheatres of gentle hills, impenetrable forests, and lakes of boiling pitch: Warner and Anne lingered on all of them, climbed to the summit of volcanoes hidden in the clouds and gazed into awful craters evil of smell and resounding with the menace of deep, imprisoned, persistent tides; sailed on the quiet lake in the crater of Mt. Pelée; rode on creole ponies for days through scented chromatic forests with serrated heights frowning above them, and companioned by birds as vivid as the flowers and as silent. There were no wild beasts, nothing to mar days and nights so heavy laden with beauty that Anne wondered if the cold North existed on the same planet, and sometimes longed for the scent of English violets.
In Trinidad they were entertained in great state by the most distinguished of Warner's relatives, a high official of the island. Anne wore for an evening the famous ring, and was nearly prostrated with excitement and the fear of losing it. If she had not been half drugged with happiness and the ineffable beauty which scarcely for a moment deserted her waking senses, she would have attempted to define the quiver of terror that crossed her nerves now and again; for life at white heat has been embolismal since the death of the gods. As to Warner, he who had written many poems, now devoted himself to living one, and achieved a perfect success.