It was not an island given over to piety, or to
religious habits.
Not that this troubled Dyck Calhoun; nor, indeed, was he shocked by the
fact that nearly every unmarried white man in the island, and many
married white men, had black mistresses and families born to the black
women, and that the girls had no married future. They would become the
temporary wives of white men, to whom they were on the whole faithful and
devoted. It did not even vex him that a wretched mulatto might be
whipped in the market-square for laying his hands upon a white man, and
that if he was a negro-slave he could be shot for the same liberty.
It all belonged to the abnormal conditions of an island where black and
white were in relations impossible in the countries from which the white
man had come. It did not even startle Dyck that all the planters, and
the people generally in the island, from the chief justice and custos
rotulorum down to the deckswabber, cultivated amplitude of living.
But let Dyck tell his own story. The papers he held were sheets of a
letter he was writing to one from whom he had heard nothing since the
night he enlisted in the navy, and that was nearly three years before.
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