My Tropic Isle

How quaint seems the demand for details of life on this Isle of Scent and
Silence! Lolling in shade and quietude, was I guilty of indiscretion when
I babbled of my serene affairs, and is the penalty so soon enforced? Can
the record of such a narrow, compressed existence be anything but dull?
Can one who is indifferent to the decrees of constituted society; who is
aloof from popular prejudices; who cares not for the gaieties of the
crowd or the vagaries of fashion; who does not dance or sing, or drink to
toasts, or habitually make any loud noise, or play cards or billiards, or
attend garden parties; who has no political ambitions; who is not a
painter, or a musician, or a man of science; whose palate is as averse
from ardent spirits as from physic; who is denied the all-redeeming vice
of teetotalism; who cannot smoke even a pipe of peace; who is a casual, a
nonentity a scout on the van of civilisation dallying with the universal
enemy, time--can such a one, so forlorn of popular attributes, so weak
and watery in his tastes, have aught to recite harmonious to the, ear of
the world?

Yet, since my life--and in the use, of the possessive pronoun here and
elsewhere, let it signify also the life of my life-partner--is beyond the
range of ordinary experience, since it is immune from the ferments which
seethe and muddle the lives of the many, I am assured that a familiar
record will not be deemed egotistical, I am scolded because I did not
confess with greater zeal, I am bidden to my pen again.

An attempt to fulfil the wishes of critics is confronted with risk. Cosy
in my security, distance an adequate defence, why should I rush into the
glare of perilous publicity? Here is an unpolluted Isle, without history,
without any sort of fame. There come to it ordinary folk of sober
understanding and well-disciplined ideas and tastes, who pass their lives
without disturbing primeval silences or insulting the free air with the
flapping of any. ostentatious flag. Their doings are not romantic, or
comic, or tragic, or heroic; they have no formula for the solution of
social problems, no sour vexations to be sweetened, no grievance against
society, no pet creed to dandle. What is to be said of the doings of such
prosaic folk--folk who have merely set themselves free from restraint
that they might follow their own fancies without hurry and without
hindrance?

Moreover, if anything be more tedious than a twice-told tale, is it not
the repetition of one half told? Since a demand is made for more complete
details than were given in my "Confessions," either I must recapitulate,
or, smiling, put the question by. It is simplicity itself to smile, and
can there be anything more gracious or becoming? Who would not rather do
so than attempt with perplexed brow a delicate, if not difficult, duty?

I propose, therefore, to hastily fill in a few blanks in my previous
sketch of our island career and to pass on to features of novelty and
interest--vignettes of certain natural and unobtrusive features of the
locality, first-hand and artless.