fiefoe

This book reads like a dream in places.

They soon came near him: where an orange tree loaded with golden fruit gleamed dark and bright in the moonlight, veiled in the pinpoint scintillation of a thousand fire-flies sat the old black saint among the branches, talking loudly, drunkenly, and confidentially with God.
The water of the bay was as smooth and immovable as basalt, yet clear as the finest gin: albeit the swell muttered a mile away on the reef. The water within the pool itself could not reasonably be smoother. No sea-breeze thought of stirring.
The sea was like a smooth pampas of quicksilver: so steady you could not split shore from reflection, till the casual collision of a pelican broke the phantom. ... The sun lit an iridescent glimmer on his shoulders: in such a light even a negro could not be black.

Names of the children - Emily, John, Rachel, Laura, etc:

It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives.
Their host was a hardened Creole: and at supper he ate Cayenne pepper with a spoon. ... This indeed was an Event of the first water: none of them ever forgot it.
(During farewell:) With a rope to be climbed dangling before his very nose, John simply did not know how this delay was to be supported, and lapsed into complete silence.
(First night on the pirate ship, arguing about whether to say prayers lying down:)
RACHEL. She mustn't, that's lazy.
JOHN. Shut up, Rachel, she must.
RACHEL. It's wicked! You go to sleep in the middle then. People who go to sleep in the middle ought to be damned, they ought. - Oughtn't they? (Silence.) Oughtn't they?
There is a period in the relations of children with any new grown-up in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again.
Grown-ups embark on a life of deception with considerable misgiving, and generally fail. But not so children. A child can hide the most appalling secret without the least effort, and is practically secure against detection.
Emily of course was too old to count as female in his eyes: but to Rachel and Laura he was indiscriminately devoted.

"A High Wind in Jamaica"