126 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
the truthfulness of the tradition, we are ready to believe that 
even ill-natured beasts would soon become amiable in the mild 
and soothing air, and that a canine millennium might, by the 
silent operation of natural laws, soon be established on those 
emerald isles. Perhaps we owe an apology to the dogs of the 
Bahamas for having stated that they are too lazy and indolent 
to bark—it may be that we should have said instead, that they 
are too amiable. The loud and persistent crowing of the roos- 
ters, during all the hours of the night, we have been recently 
assured is the crow of hunger, and not the genuine John Bull 
expression of a self-satisfied sentiment of conscious superiority. 
Killing for sport, and ‘‘the pleasures of the chase,” whether 
brutal or refined, could not have been among the pastimes of 
those who received and welcomed Columbus and his companions 
when they first landed upon the shores of the New World. And 
they had yet to learn the game of cruel and merciless war from 
the more educated and cultured savages of a higher civilization. 
In that they had no accumulated capital they were poor indeed, 
but free from the fevered dream of ambition, the unquenchable 
thirst of avarice, and the tortures of unsupplied and constantly 
increasing wants, they were vastly richer than any of the envied 
millionaires of either ancient or modern times. Simple, amiable 
and guileless children of nature, unlearned and uncultivated, 
happy and cheerful as the birds that flaunted their gay plumage 
in the spicy and perfumed air, they lived and loved in their little 
Gardens of Eden, with no ban upon the delicious and golden 
fruits of their uncultivated tropical orchards. 
These fruits, a limited supply of vegetables, and the fish which 
the surrounding ocean supplied at all times in great abundance, 
constituted their food. A vegetable and piscatory diet infused 
no frenzied fever in the blood or brain; and with no wild beasts 
in the forests or jungles, there was no savagery to be transmuted. 
