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The Shadows

Henry S. Whitehead

"I did not begin to see the shadows until I had lived in Old Morris’ house for more than a week. Old Morris, dead and gone these many years, had been the scion of a still earlier Irish settler in Santa Cruz, of a family which had come into the island when the Danes, failing to colonize its rich acres, had opened it, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, to colonists; and younger sons of Irish, Scottish, and English gentry had taken up sugar estates and commenced that baronial life which lasted for a century and which declined after the abolition of slavery and the German bounty on beet sugar had started the long process of West Indian commercial decadence. Mr. Morris’ youth had been spent in the French islands.

"The shadows were at first so vague that I attributed them wholly to the slight weakness which began to affect my eyes in early childhood, and which, while never materially interfering with the enjoyment of life in general, had necessitated the use of glasses when I used my eyes to read or write. My first experience of them was about 1 o’clock in the morning. I had been at a 'Gentlemen’s Party' at Hacker’s house, 'Emerald,' as some poetic-minded ancestor of Hacker’s had named the family estate three miles out of Christiansted, the northerly town, built on the site of the ancient abandoned French town of Bassin." . . .