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[[preprinted]] 68 [[/preprinted]] St. Vincent 7.

[[margin]] II-2-36 [[/margin]] Sunday. Spent the morning writing letters. These were to the Soc. [[strikethrough]] Eut [[/strikethrough]] Linn Lyon, Ferrie, Don Frizzell, Bierig, Miss Savariau in Jamaica.  Ruth was not feeling very well so I didn't try to go out at all.  In the afternoon I read more of Beebe's book, and after tea we worked on stamps.  Same in evening.
   Beebe has rather overdrawn most of his word pictures, it seems to me.  He must make everything seem weird and exotic, or at least unusual, and some of his similes are far-fetched and positively "feeble." He certainly exaggerates the chronicle of his trip to Furey. We were told by someone in Haiti that the MS for this book was written before Beebe ever made his trip, and while I can't believe that, I think it was largely drawn from imagination. He seems to describe himself in this excerpt. "It is the custom nowadays to "do" a city in a day,or a cathedral in an hour, or even to produce a volume of solemn critical comment after the most frightfully superficial observation.". Some other passages are: "....The "spider-like legges" of the diminutive (humming) birds are clad in scales, persistent memories through all ages of some lizardy ancestor.". "These are animal growths although they have no sex- in which they are lower than ferns-....".
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[[preprinted]] 69 [[/preprinted]]
"...at last I saw the topsails of my schooner... I thought of a queen ant spiralling slowly to earth, and in the light of succeeding events I could not consciously have shown a better simile. ..... I watched a man lower a sail alone-.....Again the queen ant came to mind for when she alights she too furls her wings, but it was not until a day or two later that the climax of the simile occurred, for then I watched the sailors.... rolling up the huge sails and dropping them into the dark hold; exactly as I have seen the queen, after her marriage flight, twist and bend and bite off her wings.....".
[[margin]] II-3-36 [[/margin]]
Went back to the Chief of Police, and he gave me a permit to drive for a month, and also a small map of the island taken from a medical report. It was then too late to go out this morning. Copied the map onto page 73 and wrote more notes.
   After lunch I rode around the southern end of the island for ten miles. The scenery is very different from anything I saw on Grenada. There are much more flat areas, and nearly everywhere else the land has been cleared. Cotton is most common, and sugars cane second. One as two small pastures were all I saw in the line of collecting places. From Calliaqua there is a fine view of Young's and Dunernette Islands.