Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 112: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Shadows by Henry Ss Whitehead Though close to the mainland, the Virgin Islands are one of the least familiar possessions of the United States, Familiar that is ‘in the sense that Hawati with its pineapples and hula dancers has become familiar to Americans. Yet these Caribbean islands have a most colorful and varied history. Under many flags, under pirate chiefs and European monarchs, French and English and Danish with primitive Indian and jungle African legendry for a foundation for the various imported super-structures, the Virgin Islands offer a unique and fertile field for the connoisseur of the uncanny. The late Reverend Whitehead, one-time missionary, presents in this story one of the host of exotic yarns that grow so strangely in the dusky tropic sun of the Spanish Main. 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 Fighteenth Century, to colonists: and younger sons of Irish, Scottish, and English gentry had taken up sugar estates and commenced that baronial life which lasted fora 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 one 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 Chris- uansted, the northerly town, built on the site of the ancient abandoned French town of Bassin. Thad come home from the party and was undressing in my bedroom, which is one of two rooms on the westerly side of the house which stands at the edge of the old “Sunday Market.” These two bedrooms open on the market-_ place, and I had chosen them, rather than the more airy rooms on the other side, because of the space outside. I like to look out on trees in the early morn- 110 ee eee Se See eee tee (= os et : comicbhooks.comn ¥