For such was he who, from the windows of his "castle," saw his domain shimmering in the sun of a hot December day.
It was Dyck Calhoun.
With an impatient air he took up the sheets that he had been reading.
Christmas Day was on his nerves.

The whole town of Kingston, with its twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants, had but one church.

If he entered it, even to-day, he would have seen no more than a hundred and fifty to two hundred people; mostly mulattoes--"bronze ornaments"-- and peasants in shag trousers, jackets of coarse blue cloth, and no waistcoats, with one or two magistrates, a dozen gentlemen or so, and probably twice that number of ladies.

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.