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+Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion, by Mark Twain
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
+no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
+it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2006 [EBook #3182]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAMBLING NOTES ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SOME RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+All the journeyings I had ever done had been purely in the way of
+business. The pleasant May weather suggested a novelty namely, a trip
+for pure recreation, the bread-and-butter element left out. The Reverend
+said he would go, too; a good man, one of the best of men, although a
+clergyman. By eleven at night we were in New Haven and on board the New
+York boat. We bought our tickets, and then went wandering around here
+and there, in the solid comfort of being free and idle, and of putting
+distance between ourselves and the mails and telegraphs.
+
+After a while I went to my stateroom and undressed, but the night
+was too enticing for bed. We were moving down the bay now, and it was
+pleasant to stand at the window and take the cool night breeze and watch
+the gliding lights on shore. Presently, two elderly men sat down
+under that window and began a conversation. Their talk was properly
+no business of mine, yet I was feeling friendly toward the world and
+willing to be entertained. I soon gathered that they were brothers, that
+they were from a small Connecticut village, and that the matter in hand
+concerned the cemetery. Said one:
+
+“Now, John, we talked it all over amongst ourselves, and this is what
+we've done. You see, everybody was a-movin' from the old buryin'-ground,
+and our folks was 'most about left to theirselves, as you may say. They
+was crowded, too, as you know; lot wa'n't big enough in the first place;
+and last year, when Seth's wife died, we couldn't hardly tuck her in.
+She sort o' overlaid Deacon Shorb's lot, and he soured on her, so to
+speak, and on the rest of us, too. So we talked it over, and I was for
+a lay out in the new simitery on the hill. They wa'n't unwilling, if
+it was cheap. Well, the two best and biggest plots was No. 8 and No.
+9--both of a size; nice comfortable room for twenty-six--twenty-six
+full-growns, that is; but you reckon in children and other shorts, and
+strike an average, and I should say you might lay in thirty, or maybe
+thirty-two or three, pretty genteel--no crowdin' to signify.”
+
+“That's a plenty, William. Which one did you buy?”
+
+“Well, I'm a-comin' to that, John. You see, No. 8 was thirteen dollars,
+No. 9 fourteen--”
+
+“I see. So's't you took No. 8.”
+
+“You wait. I took No. 9. And I'll tell you for why. In the first place,
+Deacon Shorb wanted it. Well, after the way he'd gone on about Seth's
+wife overlappin' his prem'ses, I'd 'a' beat him out of that No. 9 if I'd
+'a' had to stand two dollars extra, let alone one. That's the way I felt
+about it. Says I, what's a dollar, anyway? Life's on'y a pilgrimage,
+says I; we ain't here for good, and we can't take it with us, says I. So
+I just dumped it down, knowin' the Lord don't suffer a good deed to go
+for nothin', and cal'latin' to take it out o' somebody in the course
+o' trade. Then there was another reason, John. No. 9's a long way the
+handiest lot in the simitery, and the likeliest for situation. It lays
+right on top of a knoll in the dead center of the buryin' ground; and
+you can see Millport from there, and Tracy's, and Hopper Mount, and
+a raft o' farms, and so on. There ain't no better outlook from a
+buryin'-plot in the state. Si Higgins says so, and I reckon he ought to
+know. Well, and that ain't all. 'Course Shorb had to take No. 8; wa'n't
+no help for 't. Now, No. 8 jines onto No. 9, but it's on the slope
+of the hill, and every time it rains it 'll soak right down onto the
+Shorbs. Si Higgins says 't when the deacon's time comes, he better take
+out fire and marine insurance both on his remains.”
+
+Here there was the sound of a low, placid, duplicate chuckle of
+appreciation and satisfaction.
+
+“Now, John, here's a little rough draft of the ground that I've made
+on a piece of paper. Up here in the left-hand corner we've bunched the
+departed; took them from the old graveyard and stowed them one alongside
+o' t'other, on a first-come-first-served plan, no partialities, with
+Gran'ther Jones for a starter, on'y because it happened so, and windin'
+up indiscriminate with Seth's twins. A little crowded towards the end of
+the lay-out, maybe, but we reckoned 'twa'n't best to scatter the twins.
+Well, next comes the livin'. Here, where it's marked A, we're goin' to
+put Mariar and her family, when they're called; B, that's for Brother
+Hosea and hisn; C, Calvin and tribe. What's left is these two lots
+here--just the gem of the whole patch for general style and outlook;
+they're for me and my folks, and you and yourn. Which of them would you
+ruther be buried in?”
+
+“I swan, you've took me mighty unexpected, William! It sort of started
+the shivers. Fact is, I was thinkin' so busy about makin' things
+comfortable for the others, I hadn't thought about being buried myself.”
+
+“Life's on'y a fleetin' show, John, as the sayin' is. We've all got to
+go, sooner or later. To go with a clean record's the main thing. Fact
+is, it's the on'y thing worth strivin' for, John.”
+
+“Yes, that's so, William, that's so; there ain't no getting around it.
+Which of these lots would you recommend?”
+
+“Well, it depends, John. Are you particular about outlook?”
+
+“I don't say I am, William, I don't say I ain't. Reely, I don't know.
+But mainly, I reckon, I'd set store by a south exposure.”
+
+“That's easy fixed, John. They're both south exposure. They take the
+sun, and the Shorbs get the shade.”
+
+“How about sile, William?”
+
+“D's a sandy sile, E's mostly loom.”
+
+“You may gimme E, then; William; a sandy sile caves in, more or less,
+and costs for repairs.”
+
+“All right, set your name down here, John, under E. Now, if you don't
+mind payin' me your share of the fourteen dollars, John, while we're on
+the business, everything's fixed.”
+
+After some higgling and sharp bargaining the money was paid, and John
+bade his brother good night and took his leave. There was silence for
+some moments; then a soft chuckle welled up from the lonely William,
+and he muttered: “I declare for 't, if I haven't made a mistake! It's
+D that's mostly loom, not E. And John's booked for a sandy sile after
+all.”
+
+There was another soft chuckle, and William departed to his rest also.
+
+The next day, in New York, was a hot one. Still we managed to get more
+or less entertainment out of it. Toward the middle of the afternoon we
+arrived on board the stanch steamship Bermuda, with bag and baggage, and
+hunted for a shady place. It was blazing summer weather, until we were
+half-way down the harbor. Then I buttoned my coat closely; half an hour
+later I put on a spring overcoat and buttoned that. As we passed the
+light-ship I added an ulster and tied a handkerchief around the collar
+to hold it snug to my neck. So rapidly had the summer gone and winter
+come again!
+
+By nightfall we were far out at sea, with no land in sight. No telegrams
+could come here, no letters, no news. This was an uplifting thought. It
+was still more uplifting to reflect that the millions of harassed people
+on shore behind us were suffering just as usual.
+
+The next day brought us into the midst of the Atlantic solitudes--out
+of smoke-colored sounding into fathomless deep blue; no ships visible
+anywhere over the wide ocean; no company but Mother Carey's chickens
+wheeling, darting, skimming the waves in the sun. There were some
+seafaring men among the passengers, and conversation drifted into
+matters concerning ships and sailors. One said that “true as the needle
+to the pole” was a bad figure, since the needle seldom pointed to the
+pole. He said a ship's compass was not faithful to any particular point,
+but was the most fickle and treacherous of the servants of man. It was
+forever changing. It changed every day in the year; consequently the
+amount of the daily variation had to be ciphered out and allowance made
+for it, else the mariner would go utterly astray. Another said there was
+a vast fortune waiting for the genius who should invent a compass that
+would not be affected by the local influences of an iron ship. He said
+there was only one creature more fickle than a wooden ship's compass,
+and that was the compass of an iron ship. Then came reference to the
+well known fact that an experienced mariner can look at the compass of a
+new iron vessel, thousands of miles from her birthplace, and tell which
+way her head was pointing when she was in process of building.
+
+Now an ancient whale-ship master fell to talking about the sort of crews
+they used to have in his early days. Said he:
+
+“Sometimes we'd have a batch of college students. Queer lot. Ignorant?
+Why, they didn't know the catheads from the main brace. But if you took
+them for fools you'd get bit, sure. They'd learn more in a month than
+another man would in a year. We had one, once, in the Mary Ann, that
+came aboard with gold spectacles on. And besides, he was rigged out from
+main truck to keelson in the nobbiest clothes that ever saw a fo'castle.
+He had a chestful, too: cloaks, and broadcloth coats, and velvet vests;
+everything swell, you know; and didn't the saltwater fix them out for
+him? I guess not! Well, going to sea, the mate told him to go aloft and
+help shake out the foreto'gallants'l. Up he shins to the foretop,
+with his spectacles on, and in a minute down he comes again, looking
+insulted. Says the mate, 'What did you come down for?' Says the chap,
+'P'r'aps you didn't notice that there ain't any ladders above there.'
+You see we hadn't any shrouds above the foretop. The men bursted out in
+a laugh such as I guess you never heard the like of. Next night,
+which was dark and rainy, the mate ordered this chap to go aloft about
+something, and I'm dummed if he didn't start up with an umbrella and a
+lantern! But no matter; he made a mighty good sailor before the voyage
+was done, and we had to hunt up something else to laugh at. Years
+afterwards, when I had forgot all about him, I comes into Boston, mate
+of a ship, and was loafing around town with the second mate, and it so
+happened that we stepped into the Revere House, thinking maybe we would
+chance the salt-horse in that big diningroom for a flyer, as the
+boys say. Some fellows were talking just at our elbow, and one says,
+'Yonder's the new governor of Massachusetts--at that table over there
+with the ladies.' We took a good look my mate and I, for we hadn't
+either of us ever seen a governor before. I looked and looked at that
+face and then all of a sudden it popped on me! But I didn't give any
+sign. Says I, 'Mate, I've a notion to go over and shake hands with him.'
+Says he 'I think I see you doing it, Tom.' Says I, 'Mate I'm a-going to
+do it.' Says he, 'Oh, yes, I guess so. Maybe you don't want to bet you
+will, Tom?' Say I, 'I don't mind going a V on it, mate.' Says he 'Put it
+up.' 'Up she goes,' says I, planking the cash. This surprised him. But
+he covered it, and says pretty sarcastic, 'Hadn't you better take
+your grub with the governor and the ladies, Tom?' Says I 'Upon second
+thoughts, I will.' Says he, 'Well Tom, you aye a dum fool.' Says I,
+'Maybe I am maybe I ain't; but the main question is, do you wan to risk
+two and a half that I won't do it?' 'Make it a V,' says he. 'Done,' says
+I. I started, him a giggling and slapping his hand on his thigh, he felt
+so good. I went over there and leaned my knuckles on the table a minute
+and looked the governor in the face, and says I, 'Mr. Gardner, don't you
+know me?' He stared, and I stared, and he stared. Then all of a sudden
+he sings out, 'Tom Bowling, by the holy poker! Ladies, it's old Tom
+Bowling, that you've heard me talk about--shipmate of mine in the Mary
+Ann.' He rose up and shook hands with me ever so hearty--I sort of
+glanced around and took a realizing sense of my mate's saucer eyes--and
+then says the governor, 'Plant yourself, Tom, plant yourself; you can't
+cat your anchor again till you've had a feed with me and the ladies!' I
+planted myself alongside the governor, and canted my eye around toward
+my mate. Well, sir, his dead-lights were bugged out like tompions; and
+his mouth stood that wide open that you could have laid a ham in it
+without him noticing it.”
+
+There was great applause at the conclusion of the old captain's story;
+then, after a moment's silence, a grave, pale young man said:
+
+“Had you ever met the governor before?”
+
+The old captain looked steadily at this inquirer awhile, and then got
+up and walked aft without making any reply. One passenger after another
+stole a furtive glance at the inquirer; but failed to make him out, and
+so gave him up. It took some little work to get the talk-machinery
+to running smoothly again after this derangement; but at length a
+conversation sprang up about that important and jealously guarded
+instrument, a ship's timekeeper, its exceeding delicate accuracy, and
+the wreck and destruction that have sometimes resulted from its varying
+a few seemingly trifling moments from the true time; then, in due
+course, my comrade, the Reverend, got off on a yarn, with a fair
+wind and everything drawing. It was a true story, too--about Captain
+Rounceville's shipwreck--true in every detail. It was to this effect:
+
+Captain Rounceville's vessel was lost in mid-Atlantic, and likewise his
+wife and his two little children. Captain Rounceville and seven seamen
+escaped with life, but with little else. A small, rudely constructed
+raft was to be their home for eight days. They had neither provisions
+nor water. They had scarcely any clothing; no one had a coat but the
+captain. This coat was changing hands all the time, for the weather was
+very cold. Whenever a man became exhausted with the cold, they put the
+coat on him and laid him down between two shipmates until the garment
+and their bodies had warmed life into him again. Among the sailors was a
+Portuguese who knew no English. He seemed to have no thought of his own
+calamity, but was concerned only about the captain's bitter loss of wife
+and children. By day he would look his dumb compassion in the captain's
+face; and by night, in the darkness and the driving spray and rain, he
+would seek out the captain and try to comfort him with caressing pats
+on the shoulder. One day, when hunger and thirst were making their sure
+inroads upon the men's strength and spirits, a floating barrel was seen
+at a distance. It seemed a great find, for doubtless it contained food
+of some sort. A brave fellow swam to it, and after long and exhausting
+effort got it to the raft. It was eagerly opened. It was a barrel of
+magnesia! On the fifth day an onion was spied. A sailor swam off and got
+it. Although perishing with hunger, he brought it in its integrity and
+put it into the captain's hand. The history of the sea teaches
+that among starving, shipwrecked men selfishness is rare, and a
+wonder-compelling magnanimity the rule. The onion was equally divided
+into eight parts, and eaten with deep thanksgivings. On the eighth day
+a distant ship was sighted. Attempts were made to hoist an oar, with
+Captain Rounceville's coat on it for a signal. There were many failures,
+for the men were but skeletons now, and strengthless. At last success
+was achieved, but the signal brought no help. The ship faded out of
+sight and left despair behind her. By and by another ship appeared, and
+passed so near that the castaways, every eye eloquent with gratitude,
+made ready to welcome the boat that would be sent to save them. But
+this ship also drove on, and left these men staring their unutterable
+surprise and dismay into each other's ashen faces. Late in the day,
+still another ship came up out of the distance, but the men noted with
+a pang that her course was one which would not bring her nearer. Their
+remnant of life was nearly spent; their lips and tongues were swollen,
+parched, cracked with eight days' thirst; their bodies starved; and here
+was their last chance gliding relentlessly from them; they would not
+be alive when the next sun rose. For a day or two past the men had lost
+their voices, but now Captain Rounceville whispered, “Let us pray.”
+ The Portuguese patted him on the shoulder in sign of deep approval. All
+knelt at the base of the oar that was waving the signal-coat aloft, and
+bowed their heads. The sea was tossing; the sun rested, a red, rayless
+disk, on the sea-line in the west. When the men presently raised their
+heads they would have roared a hallelujah if they had had a voice--the
+ship's sails lay wrinkled and flapping against her masts--she was going
+about! Here was rescue at last, and in the very last instant of time
+that was left for it. No, not rescue yet--only the imminent prospect of
+it. The red disk sank under the sea, and darkness blotted out the ship.
+By and by came a pleasant sound--oars moving in a boat's rowlocks.
+Nearer it came, and nearer-within thirty steps, but nothing visible.
+Then a deep voice: “Hol-lo!” The castaways could not answer; their
+swollen tongues refused voice. The boat skirted round and round the
+raft, started away--the agony of it!--returned, rested the oars, close
+at hand, listening, no doubt. The deep voice again: “Hol-lo! Where
+are ye, shipmates?” Captain Rounceville whispered to his men, saying:
+“Whisper your best, boys! now--all at once!” So they sent out an
+eightfold whisper in hoarse concert: “Here!”, There was life in it if
+it succeeded; death if it failed. After that supreme moment Captain
+Rounceville was conscious of nothing until he came to himself on board
+the saving ship. Said the Reverend, concluding:
+
+“There was one little moment of time in which that raft could be visible
+from that ship, and only one. If that one little fleeting moment had
+passed unfruitful, those men's doom was sealed. As close as that does
+God shave events foreordained from the beginning of the world. When
+the sun reached the water's edge that day, the captain of that ship was
+sitting on deck reading his prayer-book. The book fell; he stooped to
+pick it up, and happened to glance at the sun. In that instant that
+far-off raft appeared for a second against the red disk, its needlelike
+oar and diminutive signal cut sharp and black against the bright
+surface, and in the next instant was thrust away into the dusk again.
+But that ship, that captain, and that pregnant instant had had their
+work appointed for them in the dawn of time and could not fail of the
+performance. The chronometer of God never errs!”
+
+There was deep, thoughtful silence for some moments. Then the grave,
+pale young man said:
+
+“What is the chronometer of God?”
+
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+At dinner, six o'clock, the same people assembled whom we had talked
+with on deck and seen at luncheon and breakfast this second day out,
+and at dinner the evening before. That is to say, three journeying
+ship-masters, a Boston merchant, and a returning Bermudian who had been
+absent from his Bermuda thirteen years; these sat on the starboard side.
+On the port side sat the Reverend in the seat of honor; the pale young
+man next to him; I next; next to me an aged Bermudian, returning to his
+sunny islands after an absence of twenty-seven years. Of course, our
+captain was at the head of the table, the purser at the foot of it. A
+small company, but small companies are pleasantest.
+
+No racks upon the table; the sky cloudless, the sun brilliant, the blue
+sea scarcely ruffled; then what had become of the four married couples,
+the three bachelors, and the active and obliging doctor from the rural
+districts of Pennsylvania?--for all these were on deck when we
+sailed down New York harbor. This is the explanation. I quote from my
+note-book:
+
+
+     Thursday, 3.30 P.M.  Under way, passing the Battery.  The large
+     party, of four married couples, three bachelors, and a cheery,
+     exhilarating doctor from the wilds of Pennsylvania, are evidently
+     traveling together.  All but the doctor grouped in camp-chairs on
+     deck.
+
+     Passing principal fort.  The doctor is one of those people who has
+     an infallible preventive of seasickness; is flitting from friend to
+     friend administering it and saying, “Don't you be afraid; I know
+     this medicine; absolutely infallible; prepared under my own
+     supervision.”  Takes a dose himself, intrepidly.
+
+     4.15 P.M.  Two of those ladies have struck their colors,
+     notwithstanding the “infallible.”  They have gone below.  The other
+     two begin to show distress.
+
+     5 P.M.  Exit one husband and one bachelor.  These still had their
+     infallible in cargo when they started, but arrived at the
+     companionway without it.
+
+     5.10.  Lady No. 3, two bachelors, and one married man have gone
+     below with their own opinion of the infallible.
+
+     5.20.  Passing Quarantine Hulk.  The infallible has done the
+     business for all the party except the Scotchman's wife and the
+     author of that formidable remedy.
+
+     Nearing the Light-Ship.  Exit the Scotchman's wife, head drooped on
+     stewardess's shoulder.
+
+     Entering the open sea.  Exit doctor!
+
+The rout seems permanent; hence the smallness of the company at table
+since the voyage began. Our captain is a grave, handsome Hercules of
+thirty-five, with a brown hand of such majestic size that one cannot
+eat for admiring it and wondering if a single kid or calf could furnish
+material for gloving it.
+
+Conversation not general; drones along between couples. One catches a
+sentence here and there. Like this, from Bermudian of thirteen years'
+absence: “It is the nature of women to ask trivial, irrelevant, and
+pursuing questions--questions that pursue you from a beginning
+in nothing to a run-to-cover in nowhere.” Reply of Bermudian of
+twenty-seven years' absence: “Yes; and to think they have logical,
+analytical minds and argumentative ability. You see 'em begin to whet up
+whenever they smell argument in the air.” Plainly these be philosophers.
+
+Twice since we left port our engines have stopped for a couple of
+minutes at a time. Now they stop again. Says the pale young man,
+meditatively, “There!--that engineer is sitting down to rest again.”
+
+Grave stare from the captain, whose mighty jaws cease to work, and
+whose harpooned potato stops in midair on its way to his open, paralyzed
+mouth. Presently he says in measured tones, “Is it your idea that the
+engineer of this ship propels her by a crank turned by his own hands?”
+
+The pale young man studies over this a moment, then lifts up his
+guileless eyes, and says, “Don't he?”
+
+Thus gently falls the death-blow to further conversation, and the dinner
+drags to its close in a reflective silence, disturbed by no sounds but
+the murmurous wash of the sea and the subdued clash of teeth.
+
+After a smoke and a promenade on deck, where is no motion to discompose
+our steps, we think of a game of whist. We ask the brisk and capable
+stewardess from Ireland if there are any cards in the ship.
+
+“Bless your soul, dear, indeed there is. Not a whole pack, true for ye,
+but not enough missing to signify.”
+
+However, I happened by accident to bethink me of a new pack in a morocco
+case, in my trunk, which I had placed there by mistake, thinking it to
+be a flask of something. So a party of us conquered the tedium of the
+evening with a few games and were ready for bed at six bells, mariner's
+time, the signal for putting out the lights.
+
+There was much chat in the smoking-cabin on the upper deck after
+luncheon to-day, mostly whaler yarns from those old sea-captains.
+Captain Tom Bowling was garrulous. He had that garrulous attention to
+minor detail which is born of secluded farm life or life at sea on long
+voyages, where there is little to do and time no object. He would sail
+along till he was right in the most exciting part of a yarn, and then
+say, “Well, as I was saying, the rudder was fouled, ship driving before
+the gale, head-on, straight for the iceberg, all hands holding their
+breath, turned to stone, top-hamper giving 'way, sails blown to ribbons,
+first one stick going, then another, boom! smash! crash! duck your head
+and stand from under! when up comes Johnny Rogers, capstan-bar in hand,
+eyes a-blazing, hair a-flying... no, 'twa'n't Johnny Rogers... lemme see
+... seems to me Johnny Rogers wa'n't along that voyage; he was along
+one voyage, I know that mighty well, but somehow it seems to me that he
+signed the articles for this voyage, but--but--whether he come along or
+not, or got left, or something happened--”
+
+And so on and so on till the excitement all cooled down and nobody cared
+whether the ship struck the iceberg or not.
+
+In the course of his talk he rambled into a criticism upon New England
+degrees of merit in ship building. Said he, “You get a vessel built away
+down Maine-way; Bath, for instance; what's the result? First thing you
+do, you want to heave her down for repairs--that's the result! Well,
+sir, she hain't been hove down a week till you can heave a dog through
+her seams. You send that vessel to sea, and what's the result? She wets
+her oakum the first trip! Leave it to any man if 'tain't so. Well,
+you let our folks build you a vessel--down New Bedford-way. What's the
+result? Well, sir, you might take that ship and heave her down, and keep
+her hove down six months, and she'll never shed a tear!”
+
+Everybody, landsmen and all, recognized the descriptive neatness of
+that figure, and applauded, which greatly pleased the old man. A moment
+later, the meek eyes of the pale young fellow heretofore mentioned came
+up slowly, rested upon the old man's face a moment, and the meek mouth
+began to open.
+
+“Shet your head!” shouted the old mariner.
+
+It was a rather startling surprise to everybody, but it was effective
+in the matter of its purpose. So the conversation flowed on instead of
+perishing.
+
+There was some talk about the perils of the sea, and a landsman
+delivered himself of the customary nonsense about the poor mariner
+wandering in far oceans, tempest-tossed, pursued by dangers, every
+storm-blast and thunderbolt in the home skies moving the friends by
+snug firesides to compassion for that poor mariner, and prayers for his
+succor. Captain Bowling put up with this for a while, and then burst out
+with a new view of the matter.
+
+“Come, belay there! I have read this kind of rot all my life in poetry
+and tales and such-like rubbage. Pity for the poor mariner! sympathy for
+the poor mariner! All right enough, but not in the way the poetry puts
+it. Pity for the mariner's wife! all right again, but not in the way the
+poetry puts it. Look-a here! whose life's the safest in the whole world?
+The poor mariner's. You look at the statistics, you'll see. So don't you
+fool away any sympathy on the poor mariner's dangers and privations and
+sufferings. Leave that to the poetry muffs. Now you look at the other
+side a minute. Here is Captain Brace, forty years old, been at sea
+thirty. On his way now to take command of his ship and sail south from
+Bermuda. Next week he'll be under way; easy times; comfortable quarters;
+passengers, sociable company; just enough to do to keep his mind healthy
+and not tire him; king over his ship, boss of everything and everybody;
+thirty years' safety to learn him that his profession ain't a dangerous
+one. Now you look back at his home. His wife's a feeble woman; she's a
+stranger in New York; shut up in blazing hot or freezing cold lodgings,
+according to the season; don't know anybody hardly; no company but her
+lonesomeness and her thoughts; husband gone six months at a time.
+She has borne eight children; five of them she has buried without her
+husband ever setting eyes on them. She watched them all the long nights
+till they died--he comfortable on the sea; she followed them to the
+grave, she heard the clods fall that broke her heart he comfortable on
+the sea; she mourned at home, weeks and weeks, missing them every day
+and every hour--he cheerful at sea, knowing nothing about it. Now look
+at it a minute--turn it over in your mind and size it: five children
+born, she among strangers, and him not by to hearten her; buried,
+and him not by to comfort her; think of that! Sympathy for the poor
+mariner's perils is rot; give it to his wife's hard lines, where it
+belongs! Poetry makes out that all the wife worries about is the dangers
+her husband's running. She's got substantialer things to worry over,
+I tell you. Poetry's always pitying the poor mariner on account of his
+perils at sea; better a blamed sight pity him for the nights he can't
+sleep for thinking of how he had to leave his wife in her very birth
+pains, lonesome and friendless, in the thick of disease and trouble and
+death. If there's one thing that can make me madder than another, it's
+this sappy, damned maritime poetry!”
+
+Captain Brace was a patient, gentle, seldom speaking man, with a
+pathetic something in his bronzed face that had been a mystery up to
+this time, but stood interpreted now since we had heard his story. He
+had voyaged eighteen times to the Mediterranean, seven times to India,
+once to the arctic pole in a discovery-ship, and “between times” had
+visited all the remote seas and ocean corners of the globe. But he said
+that twelve years ago, on account of his family, he “settled down,” and
+ever since then had ceased to roam. And what do you suppose was this
+simple-hearted, lifelong wanderer's idea of settling down and ceasing to
+roam? Why, the making of two five-month voyages a year between Surinam
+and Boston for sugar and molasses!
+
+Among other talk to-day, it came out that whale-ships carry no doctor.
+The captain adds the doctorship to his own duties. He not only gives
+medicines, but sets broken limbs after notions of his own, or saws
+them off and sears the stump when amputation seems best. The captain is
+provided with a medicine-chest, with the medicines numbered instead of
+named. A book of directions goes with this. It describes diseases and
+symptoms, and says, “Give a teaspoonful of No. 9 once an hour,” or “Give
+ten grains of No. 12 every half-hour,” etc. One of our sea-captains
+came across a skipper in the North Pacific who was in a state of great
+surprise and perplexity. Said he:
+
+“There's something rotten about this medicine-chest business. One of
+my men was sick--nothing much the matter. I looked in the book: it said
+give him a teaspoonful of No. 15. I went to the medicine-chest, and
+I see I was out of No. 15. I judged I'd got to get up a combination
+somehow that would fill the bill; so I hove into the fellow half a
+teaspoonful of No. 8 and half a teaspoonful of No. 7, and I'll be hanged
+if it didn't kill him in fifteen minutes! There's something about this
+medicine-chest system that's too many for me!”
+
+There was a good deal of pleasant gossip about old Captain “Hurricane”
+ Jones, of the Pacific Ocean--peace to his ashes! Two or three of
+us present had known him; I particularly well, for I had made four
+sea-voyages with him. He was a very remarkable man. He was born in a
+ship; he picked up what little education he had among his shipmates;
+he began life in the forecastle, and climbed grade by grade to the
+captaincy. More than fifty years of his sixty-five were spent at sea.
+He had sailed all oceans, seen all lands, and borrowed a tint from all
+climates. When a man has been fifty years at sea he necessarily knows
+nothing of men, nothing of the world but its surface, nothing of the
+world's thought, nothing of the world's learning but it's A B C, and
+that blurred and distorted by the unfocused lenses of an untrained mind.
+Such a man is only a gray and bearded child. That is what old Hurricane
+Jones was--simply an innocent, lovable old infant. When his spirit was
+in repose he was as sweet and gentle as a girl; when his wrath was up he
+was a hurricane that made his nickname seem tamely descriptive. He
+was formidable in a fight, for he was of powerful build and dauntless
+courage. He was frescoed from head to heel with pictures and mottoes
+tattooed in red and blue India ink. I was with him one voyage when he
+got his last vacant space tattooed; this vacant space was around his
+left ankle. During three days he stumped about the ship with his ankle
+bare and swollen, and this legend gleaming red and angry out from a
+clouding of India ink: “Virtue is its own R'd.” (There was a lack of
+room.) He was deeply and sincerely pious, and swore like a fishwoman. He
+considered swearing blameless, because sailors would not understand an
+order unillumined by it. He was a profound biblical scholar--that is, he
+thought he was. He believed everything in the Bible, but he had his own
+methods of arriving at his beliefs. He was of the “advanced” school
+of thinkers, and applied natural laws to the interpretation of all
+miracles, somewhat on the plan of the people who make the six days of
+creation six geological epochs, and so forth. Without being aware of it,
+he was a rather severe satire on modern scientific religionists. Such
+a man as I have been describing is rabidly fond of disquisition and
+argument; one knows that without being told it.
+
+One trip the captain had a clergyman on board, but did not know he was
+a clergyman, since the passenger-list did not betray the fact. He took
+a great liking to this Reverend Mr. Peters, and talked with him a great
+deal; told him yarns, gave him toothsome scraps of personal history, and
+wove a glittering streak of profanity through his garrulous fabric that
+was refreshing to a spirit weary of the dull neutralities of undecorated
+speech. One day the captain said, “Peters, do you ever read the Bible?”
+
+“Well--yes.”
+
+“I judge it ain't often, by the way you say it. Now, you tackle it in
+dead earnest once, and you'll find it'll pay. Don't you get discouraged,
+but hang right on. First, you won't understand it; but by and by things
+will begin to clear up, and then you wouldn't lay it down to eat.”
+
+“Yes, I have heard that said.”
+
+“And it's so, too. There ain't a book that begins with it. It lays over
+'m all, Peters. There's some pretty tough things in it--there ain't any
+getting around that--but you stick to them and think them out, and when
+once you get on the inside everything's plain as day.”
+
+“The miracles, too, captain?”
+
+“Yes, sir! the miracles, too. Every one of them. Now, there's that
+business with the prophets of Baal; like enough that stumped you?”
+
+“Well, I don't know but--”
+
+“Own up now; it stumped you. Well, I don't wonder. You hadn't had any
+experience in raveling such things out, and naturally it was too many
+for you. Would you like to have me explain that thing to you, and show
+you how to get at the meat of these matters?”
+
+“Indeed, I would, captain, if you don't mind.”
+
+Then the captain proceeded as follows: “I'll do it with pleasure.
+First, you see, I read and read, and thought and thought, till I got
+to understand what sort of people they were in the old Bible times, and
+then after that it was all clear and easy. Now this was the way I put
+it up, concerning Isaac--[This is the captain's own mistake]--and the
+prophets of Baal. There was some mighty sharp men among the public
+characters of that old ancient day, and Isaac was one of them. Isaac
+had his failings--plenty of them, too; it ain't for me to apologize
+for Isaac; he played it on the prophets of Baal, and like enough he was
+justifiable, considering the odds that was against him. No, all I say
+is, 'twa'n't any miracle, and that I'll show you so's't you can see it
+yourself.
+
+“Well, times had been getting rougher and rougher for prophets--that
+is, prophets of Isaac's denomination. There was four hundred and fifty
+prophets of Baal in the community, and only one Presbyterian; that is,
+if Isaac was a Presbyterian, which I reckon he was, but it don't say.
+Naturally, the prophets of Baal took all the trade. Isaac was pretty
+low-spirited, I reckon, but he was a good deal of a man, and no doubt
+he went a-prophesying around, letting on to be doing a land-office
+business, but 'twa'n't any use; he couldn't run any opposition to amount
+to anything. By and by things got desperate with him; he sets his head
+to work and thinks it all out, and then what does he do? Why, he
+begins to throw out hints that the other parties are this and that and
+t'other--nothing very definite, maybe, but just kind of undermining
+their reputation in a quiet way. This made talk, of course, and finally
+got to the king. The king asked Isaac what he meant by his talk. Says
+Isaac, 'Oh, nothing particular; only, can they pray-down fire from
+heaven on an altar? It ain't much, maybe, your majesty, only can they do
+it? That's the idea.' So the king was a good deal disturbed, and he went
+to the prophets of Baal, and they said, pretty airy, that if he had
+an altar ready, they were ready; and they intimated he better get it
+insured, too.
+
+“So next morning all the children of Israel and their parents and the
+other people gathered themselves together. Well, here was that great
+crowd of prophets of Baal packed together on one side, and Isaac walking
+up and down all alone on the other, putting up his job. When time was
+called, Isaac let on to be comfortable and indifferent; told the other
+team to take the first innings. So they went at it, the whole four
+hundred and fifty, praying around the altar, very hopeful, and doing
+their level best. They prayed an hour--two hours--three hours--and so
+on, plumb till noon. It wa'n't any use; they hadn't took a trick. Of
+course they felt kind of ashamed before all those people, and well they
+might. Now, what would a magnanimous man do? Keep still, wouldn't he? Of
+course. What did Isaac do? He graveled the prophets of Baal every way
+he could think of. Says he, 'You don't speak up loud enough; your god's
+asleep, like enough, or maybe he's taking a walk; you want to holler,
+you know'--or words to that effect; I don't recollect the exact
+language. Mind, I don't apologize for Isaac; he had his faults.
+
+“Well, the prophets of Baal prayed along the best they knew how all the
+afternoon, and never raised, a spark. At last, about sundown, they were
+all tuckered out, and they owned up and quit.
+
+“What does Isaac do now? He steps up and says to some friends of
+his there, 'Pour four barrels of water on the altar!' Everybody was
+astonished; for the other side had prayed at it dry, you know, and got
+whitewashed. They poured it on. Says he, 'Heave on four more barrels.'
+Then he says, 'Heave on four more.' Twelve barrels, you see, altogether.
+The water ran all over the altar, and all down the sides, and filled up
+a trench around it that would hold a couple of hogsheads-'measures,' it
+says; I reckon it means about a hogshead. Some of the people were going
+to put on their things and go, for they allowed he was crazy. They
+didn't know Isaac. Isaac knelt down and began to pray; he strung along,
+and strung along, about the heathen in distant lands, and about the
+sister churches, and about the state and the country at large, and about
+those that's in authority in the government, and all the usual program,
+you know, till everybody had got tired and gone to thinking about
+something else, and then, all of a sudden, when nobody was noticing, he
+outs with a match and rakes it on the under side of his leg, and pff!
+up the whole thing blazes like a house afire! Twelve barrels of water?
+Petroleum, sir, PETROLEUM! that's what it was!”
+
+“Petroleum, captain?”
+
+“Yes, sir, the country was full of it. Isaac knew all about that. You
+read the Bible. Don't you worry about the tough places. They ain't tough
+when you come to think them out and throw light on them. There ain't a
+thing in the Bible but what is true; all you want is to go prayerfully
+to work and cipher out how 'twas done.”
+
+At eight o'clock on the third morning out from New York, land was
+sighted. Away across the sunny waves one saw a faint dark stripe
+stretched along under the horizon--or pretended to see it, for the
+credit of his eyesight. Even the Reverend said he saw it, a thing which
+was manifestly not so. But I never have seen any one who was morally
+strong enough to confess that he could not see land when others claimed
+that they could.
+
+By and by the Bermuda Islands were easily visible. The principal one
+lay upon the water in the distance, a long, dull-colored body; scalloped
+with slight hills and valleys. We could not go straight at it, but had
+to travel all the way around it, sixteen miles from shore, because it is
+fenced with an invisible coral reef. At last we sighted buoys, bobbing
+here and there, and then we glided into a narrow channel among them,
+“raised the reef,” and came upon shoaling blue water that soon further
+shoaled into pale green, with a surface scarcely rippled. Now came the
+resurrection hour; the berths gave up their dead. Who are these pale
+specters in plug-hats and silken flounces that file up the companionway
+in melancholy procession and step upon the deck? These are they which
+took the infallible preventive of seasickness in New York harbor and
+then disappeared and were forgotten. Also there came two or three faces
+not seen before until this moment. One's impulse is to ask, “Where did
+you come aboard?”
+
+We followed the narrow channel a long time, with land on both sides--low
+hills that might have been green and grassy, but had a faded look
+instead. However, the land-locked water was lovely, at any rate, with
+its glittering belts of blue and green where moderate soundings were,
+and its broad splotches of rich brown where the rocks lay near the
+surface. Everybody was feeling so well that even the grave, pale young
+man (who, by a sort of kindly common consent, had come latterly to be
+referred to as “The Ass”) received frequent and friendly notice--which
+was right enough, for there was no harm in him.
+
+At last we steamed between two island points whose rocky jaws allowed
+only just enough room for the vessel's body, and now before us loomed
+Hamilton on her clustered hillsides and summits, the whitest mass of
+terraced architecture that exists in the world, perhaps.
+
+It was Sunday afternoon, and on the pier were gathered one or two
+hundred Bermudians, half of them black, half of them white, and all of
+them nobbily dressed, as the poet says.
+
+Several boats came off to the ship, bringing citizens. One of these
+citizens was a faded, diminutive old gentleman, who approached our most
+ancient passenger with a childlike joy in his twinkling eyes, halted
+before him, folded his arms, and said, smiling with all his might and
+with all the simple delight that was in him, “You don't know me, John!
+Come, out with it now; you know you don't!”
+
+The ancient passenger scanned him perplexedly, scanned the napless,
+threadbare costume of venerable fashion that had done Sunday service no
+man knows how many years, contemplated the marvelous stovepipe hat of
+still more ancient and venerable pattern, with its poor, pathetic old
+stiff brim canted up “gallusly” in the wrong places, and said, with a
+hesitation that indicated strong internal effort to “place” the gentle
+old apparition, “Why... let me see... plague on it... there's something
+about you that... er... er... but I've been gone from Bermuda for
+twenty-seven years, and... hum, hum ... I don't seem to get at it,
+somehow, but there's something about you that is just as familiar to me
+as--”
+
+“Likely it might be his hat,” murmured the Ass, with innocent,
+sympathetic interest.
+
+So the Reverend and I had at last arrived at Hamilton, the principal
+town in the Bermuda Islands. A wonderfully white town; white as snow
+itself. White as marble; white as flour. Yet looking like none of these,
+exactly. Never mind, we said; we shall hit upon a figure by and by that
+will describe this peculiar white.
+
+It was a town that was compacted together upon the sides and tops of
+a cluster of small hills. Its outlying borders fringed off and thinned
+away among the cedar forests, and there was no woody distance of curving
+coast or leafy islet sleeping upon the dimpled, painted sea, but was
+flecked with shining white points--half-concealed houses peeping out of
+the foliage. The architecture of the town was mainly Spanish,
+inherited from the colonists of two hundred and fifty years ago. Some
+ragged-topped cocoa-palms, glimpsed here and there, gave the land a
+tropical aspect.
+
+There was an ample pier of heavy masonry; upon this, under shelter, were
+some thousands of barrels containing that product which has carried the
+fame of Bermuda to many lands, the potato. With here and there an onion.
+That last sentence is facetious; for they grow at least two onions in
+Bermuda to one potato. The onion is the pride and joy of Bermuda. It
+is her jewel, her gem of gems. In her conversation, her pulpit, her
+literature, it is her most frequent and eloquent figure. In Bermuda
+metaphor it stands for perfection--perfection absolute.
+
+The Bermudian weeping over the departed exhausts praise when he says,
+“He was an onion!” The Bermudian extolling the living hero bankrupts
+applause when he says, “He is an onion!” The Bermudian setting his son
+upon the stage of life to dare and do for himself climaxes all counsel,
+supplication, admonition, comprehends all ambition, when he says, “Be an
+onion!”
+
+When parallel with the pier, and ten or fifteen steps outside it,
+we anchored. It was Sunday, bright and sunny. The groups upon the
+pier--men, youths, and boys--were whites and blacks in about equal
+proportion. All were well and neatly dressed; many of them nattily, a
+few of them very stylishly. One would have to travel far before he would
+find another town of twelve thousand inhabitants that could represent
+itself so respectably, in the matter of clothes, on a freight-pier,
+without premeditation or effort. The women and young girls, black and
+white, who occasionally passed by, were nicely clad, and many were
+elegantly and fashionably so. The men did not affect summer clothing
+much, but the girls and women did, and their white garments were good to
+look at, after so many months of familiarity with somber colors.
+
+Around one isolated potato-barrel stood four young gentlemen, two black,
+two white, becomingly dressed, each with the head of a slender cane
+pressed against his teeth, and each with a foot propped up on the
+barrel. Another young gentleman came up, looked longingly at the barrel,
+but saw no rest for his foot there, and turned pensively away to seek
+another barrel. He wandered here and there, but without result. Nobody
+sat upon a barrel, as is the custom of the idle in other lands, yet
+all the isolated barrels were humanly occupied. Whosoever had a foot
+to spare put it on a barrel, if all the places on it were not already
+taken. The habits of all peoples are determined by their circumstances.
+The Bermudians lean upon barrels because of the scarcity of lamp-posts.
+
+Many citizens came on board and spoke eagerly to the officers--inquiring
+about the Turco-Russian war news, I supposed. However, by listening
+judiciously I found that this was not so. They said, “What is the price
+of onions?” or, “How's onions?” Naturally enough this was their first
+interest; but they dropped into the war the moment it was satisfied.
+
+We went ashore and found a novelty of a pleasant nature: there were
+no hackmen, hacks, or omnibuses on the pier or about it anywhere, and
+nobody offered his services to us, or molested us in any way. I said it
+was like being in heaven. The Reverend rebukingly and rather pointedly
+advised me to make the most of it, then. We knew of a boarding-house,
+and what we needed now was somebody to pilot us to it. Presently
+a little barefooted colored boy came along, whose raggedness was
+conspicuously not un-Bermudian. His rear was so marvelously bepatched
+with colored squares and triangles that one was half persuaded he had
+got it out of an atlas. When the sun struck him right, he was as good
+to follow as a lightning-bug. We hired him and dropped into his wake.
+He piloted us through one picturesque street after another, and in due
+course deposited us where we belonged. He charged nothing for his map,
+and but a trifle for his services: so the Reverend doubled it. The
+little chap received the money with a beaming applause in his eye which
+plainly said, “This man's an onion!”
+
+We had brought no letters of introduction; our names had been misspelled
+in the passenger-list; nobody knew whether we were honest folk or
+otherwise. So we were expecting to have a good private time in case
+there was nothing in our general aspect to close boarding-house doors
+against us. We had no trouble. Bermuda has had but little experience of
+rascals, and is not suspicious. We got large, cool, well-lighted rooms
+on a second floor, overlooking a bloomy display of flowers and flowering
+shrubscalia and annunciation lilies, lantanas, heliotrope, jasmine,
+roses, pinks, double geraniums, oleanders, pomegranates, blue
+morning-glories of a great size, and many plants that were unknown to
+me.
+
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+So the Reverend and I had at last arrived at Hamilton, the principal
+town in the Bermuda Islands.
+
+We took a long afternoon walk, and soon found out that that exceedingly
+white town was built of blocks of white coral. Bermuda is a coral
+island, with a six-inch crust of soil on top of it, and every man has
+a quarry on his own premises. Everywhere you go you see square recesses
+cut into the hillsides, with perpendicular walls unmarred by crack
+or crevice, and perhaps you fancy that a house grew out of the ground
+there, and has been removed in a single piece from the mold. If you do,
+you err. But the material for a house has been quarried there. They cut
+right down through the coral, to any depth that is convenient--ten to
+twenty feet--and take it out in great square blocks. This cutting is
+done with a chisel that has a handle twelve or fifteen feet long, and is
+used as one uses a crowbar when he is drilling a hole, or a dasher when
+he is churning. Thus soft is this stone. Then with a common handsaw they
+saw the great blocks into handsome, huge bricks that are two feet long,
+a foot wide, and about six inches thick. These stand loosely piled
+during a month to harden; then the work of building begins.
+
+The house is built of these blocks; it is roofed with broad coral slabs
+an inch thick, whose edges lap upon each other, so that the roof looks
+like a succession of shallow steps or terraces; the chimneys are built
+of the coral blocks, and sawed into graceful and picturesque patterns;
+the ground-floor veranda is paved with coral blocks; also the walk to
+the gate; the fence is built of coral blocks--built in massive panels,
+with broad capstones and heavy gate-posts, and the whole trimmed into
+easy lines and comely shape with the saw. Then they put a hard coat of
+whitewash, as thick as your thumb-nail, on the fence and all over the
+house, roof, chimneys, and all; the sun comes out and shines on this
+spectacle, and it is time for you to shut your unaccustomed eyes, lest
+they be put out. It is the whitest white you can conceive of, and the
+blindingest. A Bermuda house does not look like marble; it is a much
+intenser white than that; and, besides, there is a dainty, indefinable
+something else about its look that is not marble-like. We put in a great
+deal of solid talk and reflection over this matter of trying to find a
+figure that would describe the unique white of a Bermuda house, and we
+contrived to hit upon it at last. It is exactly the white of the icing
+of a cake, and has the same unemphasized and scarcely perceptible
+polish. The white of marble is modest and retiring compared with it.
+
+After the house is cased in its hard scale of whitewash, not a crack, or
+sign of a seam, or joining of the blocks is detectable, from base-stone
+to chimney-top; the building looks as if it had been carved from a
+single block of stone, and the doors and windows sawed out afterward. A
+white marble house has a cold, tomb-like, unsociable look, and takes
+the conversation out of a body and depresses him. Not so with a Bermuda
+house. There is something exhilarating, even hilarious, about its vivid
+whiteness when the sun plays upon it. If it be of picturesque shape and
+graceful contour--and many of the Bermudian dwellings are--it will so
+fascinate you that you will keep your eyes on it until they ache. One
+of those clean-cut, fanciful chimneys--too pure and white for this
+world--with one side glowing in the sun and the other touched with a
+soft shadow, is an object that will charm one's gaze by the hour. I know
+of no other country that has chimneys worthy to be gazed at and gloated
+over. One of those snowy houses, half concealed and half glimpsed
+through green foliage, is a pretty thing to see; and if it takes one by
+surprise and suddenly, as he turns a sharp corner of a country road, it
+will wring an exclamation from him, sure.
+
+Wherever you go, in town or country, you find those snowy houses, and
+always with masses of bright-colored flowers about them, but with no
+vines climbing their walls; vines cannot take hold of the smooth, hard
+whitewash. Wherever you go, in the town or along the country roads,
+among little potato farms and patches or expensive country-seats, these
+stainless white dwellings, gleaming out from flowers and foliage, meet
+you at every turn. The least little bit of a cottage is as white and
+blemishless as the stateliest mansion. Nowhere is there dirt or stench,
+puddle or hog-wallow, neglect, disorder, or lack of trimness and
+neatness. The roads, the streets, the dwellings, the people, the
+clothes--this neatness extends to everything that falls under the eye.
+It is the tidiest country in the world. And very much the tidiest, too.
+
+Considering these things, the question came up, Where do the poor live?
+No answer was arrived at. Therefore, we agreed to leave this conundrum
+for future statesmen to wrangle over.
+
+What a bright and startling spectacle one of those blazing white
+country palaces, with its brown-tinted window-caps and ledges, and green
+shutters, and its wealth of caressing flowers and foliage, would be in
+black London! And what a gleaming surprise it would be in nearly any
+American city one could mention, too!
+
+Bermuda roads are made by cutting down a few inches into the solid white
+coral--or a good many feet, where a hill intrudes itself--and smoothing
+off the surface of the road-bed. It is a simple and easy process. The
+grain of the coral is coarse and porous; the road-bed has the look of
+being made of coarse white sugar. Its excessive cleanness and whiteness
+are a trouble in one way: the sun is reflected into your eyes with
+such energy as you walk along that you want to sneeze all the time. Old
+Captain Tom Bowling found another difficulty. He joined us in our walk,
+but kept wandering unrestfully to the roadside. Finally he explained.
+Said he, “Well, I chew, you know, and the road's so plagued clean.”
+
+We walked several miles that afternoon in the bewildering glare of the
+sun, the white roads, and the white buildings. Our eyes got to paining
+us a good deal. By and by a soothing, blessed twilight spread its cool
+balm around. We looked up in pleased surprise and saw that it proceeded
+from an intensely black negro who was going by. We answered his military
+salute in the grateful gloom of his near presence, and then passed on
+into the pitiless white glare again.
+
+The colored women whom we met usually bowed and spoke; so did the
+children. The colored men commonly gave the military salute. They borrow
+this fashion from the soldiers, no doubt; England has kept a garrison
+here for generations. The younger men's custom of carrying small canes
+is also borrowed from the soldiers, I suppose, who always carry a cane,
+in Bermuda as everywhere else in Britain's broad dominions.
+
+The country roads curve and wind hither and thither in the delightfulest
+way, unfolding pretty surprises at every turn: billowy masses of
+oleander that seem to float out from behind distant projections like the
+pink cloud-banks of sunset; sudden plunges among cottages and gardens,
+life and activity, followed by as sudden plunges into the somber
+twilight and stillness of the woods; flitting visions of white
+fortresses and beacon towers pictured against the sky on remote
+hilltops; glimpses of shining green sea caught for a moment through
+opening headlands, then lost again; more woods and solitude; and by and
+by another turn lays bare, without warning, the full sweep of the
+inland ocean, enriched with its bars of soft color and graced with its
+wandering sails.
+
+Take any road you please, you may depend upon it you will not stay in
+it half a mile. Your road is everything that a road ought to be: it is
+bordered with trees, and with strange plants and flowers; it is shady
+and pleasant, or sunny and still pleasant; it carries you by the
+prettiest and peacefulest and most homelike of homes, and through
+stretches of forest that lie in a deep hush sometimes, and sometimes are
+alive with the music of birds; it curves always, which is a continual
+promise, whereas straight roads reveal everything at a glance and kill
+interest. Your road is all this, and yet you will not stay in it half a
+mile, for the reason that little seductive, mysterious roads are always
+branching out from it on either hand, and as these curve sharply also
+and hide what is beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your
+own chosen road and explore them. You are usually paid for your trouble;
+consequently, your walk inland always turns out to be one of the most
+crooked, involved, purposeless, and interesting experiences a body can
+imagine. There is enough of variety. Sometimes you are in the level
+open, with marshes thick grown with flag-lances that are ten feet high
+on the one hand, and potato and onion orchards on the other; next, you
+are on a hilltop, with the ocean and the islands spread around you;
+presently the road winds through a deep cut, shut in by perpendicular
+walls thirty or forty feet high, marked with the oddest and abruptest
+stratum lines, suggestive of sudden and eccentric old upheavals, and
+garnished with here and there a clinging adventurous flower, and here
+and there a dangling vine; and by and by your way is along the sea edge,
+and you may look down a fathom or two through the transparent water and
+watch the diamond-like flash and play of the light upon the rocks and
+sands on the bottom until you are tired of it--if you are so constituted
+as to be able to get tired of it.
+
+You may march the country roads in maiden meditation, fancy free, by
+field and farm, for no dog will plunge out at you from unsuspected gate,
+with breath-taking surprise of ferocious bark, notwithstanding it is
+a Christian land and a civilized. We saw upward of a million cats in
+Bermuda, but the people are very abstemious in the matter of dogs. Two
+or three nights we prowled the country far and wide, and never once were
+accosted by a dog. It is a great privilege to visit such a land. The
+cats were no offense when properly distributed, but when piled they
+obstructed travel.
+
+As we entered the edge of the town that Sunday afternoon, we stopped
+at a cottage to get a drink of water. The proprietor, a middle-aged
+man with a good face, asked us to sit down and rest. His dame brought
+chairs, and we grouped ourselves in the shade of the trees by the door.
+Mr. Smith--that was not his name, but it will answer--questioned us
+about ourselves and our country, and we answered him truthfully, as a
+general thing, and questioned him in return. It was all very simple
+and pleasant and sociable. Rural, too; for there was a pig and a small
+donkey and a hen anchored out, close at hand, by cords to their legs, on
+a spot that purported to be grassy. Presently, a woman passed along, and
+although she coldly said nothing she changed the drift of our talk. Said
+Smith:
+
+“She didn't look this way, you noticed? Well, she is our next neighbor
+on one side, and there's another family that's our next neighbors on the
+other side; but there's a general coolness all around now, and we don't
+speak. Yet these three families, one generation and another, have lived
+here side by side and been as friendly as weavers for a hundred and
+fifty years, till about a year ago.”
+
+“Why, what calamity could have been powerful enough to break up so old a
+friendship?”
+
+“Well, it was too bad, but it couldn't be helped. It happened like this:
+About a year or more ago, the rats got to pestering my place a good
+deal, and I set up a steel trap in my back yard. Both of these neighbors
+run considerable to cats, and so I warned them about the trap, because
+their cats were pretty sociable around here nights, and they might get
+into trouble without my intending it. Well, they shut up their cats for
+a while, but you know how it is with people; they got careless, and sure
+enough one night the trap took Mrs. Jones's principal tomcat into camp
+and finished him up. In the morning Mrs. Jones comes here with the
+corpse in her arms, and cries and takes on the same as if it was a
+child. It was a cat by the name of Yelverton--Hector G. Yelverton--a
+troublesome old rip, with no more principle than an Injun, though you
+couldn't make her believe it. I said all a man could to comfort her, but
+no, nothing would do but I must pay for him. Finally, I said I warn't
+investing in cats now as much as I was, and with that she walked off in
+a huff, carrying the remains with her. That closed our intercourse with
+the Joneses. Mrs. Jones joined another church and took her tribe with
+her. She said she would not hold fellowship with assassins. Well, by and
+by comes Mrs. Brown's turn--she that went by here a minute ago. She had
+a disgraceful old yellow cat that she thought as much of as if he was
+twins, and one night he tried that trap on his neck, and it fitted him
+so, and was so sort of satisfactory, that he laid down and curled up and
+stayed with it. Such was the end of Sir John Baldwin.”
+
+“Was that the name of the cat?”
+
+“The same. There's cats around here with names that would surprise
+you. Maria” (to his wife), “what was that cat's name that eat a keg of
+ratsbane by mistake over at Hooper's, and started home and got struck by
+lightning and took the blind staggers and fell in the well and was 'most
+drowned before they could fish him out?”
+
+“That was that colored Deacon Jackson's cat. I only remember the last
+end of its name, which was Hold-The-Fort-For-I-Am-Coming Jackson.”
+
+“Sho! that ain't the one. That's the one that eat up an entire box of
+Seidlitz powders, and then hadn't any more judgment than to go and take
+a drink. He was considered to be a great loss, but I never could see it.
+Well, no matter about the names. Mrs. Brown wanted to be reasonable, but
+Mrs. Jones wouldn't let her. She put her up to going to law for damages.
+So to law she went, and had the face to claim seven shillings and
+sixpence. It made a great stir. All the neighbors went to court.
+Everybody took sides. It got hotter and hotter, and broke up all the
+friendships for three hundred yards around--friendships that had lasted
+for generations and generations.
+
+“Well, I proved by eleven witnesses that the cat was of a low character
+and very ornery, and warn't worth a canceled postage-stamp, anyway,
+taking the average of cats here; but I lost the case. What could I
+expect? The system is all wrong here, and is bound to make revolution
+and bloodshed some day. You see, they give the magistrate a poor little
+starvation salary, and then turn him loose on the public to gouge for
+fees and costs to live on. What is the natural result? Why, he never
+looks into the justice of a case--never once. All he looks at is which
+client has got the money. So this one piled the fees and costs and
+everything on to me. I could pay specie, don't you see? and he knew
+mighty well that if he put the verdict on to Mrs. Brown, where it
+belonged, he'd have to take his swag in currency.”
+
+“Currency? Why, has Bermuda a currency?”
+
+“Yes--onions. And they were forty per cent. discount, too, then, because
+the season had been over as much as three months. So I lost my case. I
+had to pay for that cat. But the general trouble the case made was the
+worst thing about it. Broke up so much good feeling. The neighbors don't
+speak to each other now. Mrs. Brown had named a child after me. But she
+changed its name right away. She is a Baptist. Well, in the course of
+baptizing it over again it got drowned. I was hoping we might get to be
+friendly again some time or other, but of course this drowning the child
+knocked that all out of the question. It would have saved a world of
+heartbreak and ill blood if she had named it dry.”
+
+I knew by the sigh that this was honest. All this trouble and all this
+destruction of confidence in the purity of the bench on account of a
+seven-shilling lawsuit about a cat! Somehow, it seemed to “size” the
+country.
+
+At this point we observed that an English flag had just been placed at
+half-mast on a building a hundred yards away. I and my friends were
+busy in an instant trying to imagine whose death, among the island
+dignitaries, could command such a mark of respect as this. Then a
+shudder shook them and me at the same moment, and I knew that we
+had jumped to one and the same conclusion: “The governor has gone to
+England; it is for the British admiral!”
+
+At this moment Mr. Smith noticed the flag. He said with emotion:
+
+“That's on a boarding-house. I judge there's a boarder dead.”
+
+A dozen other flags within view went to half-mast.
+
+“It's a boarder, sure,” said Smith.
+
+“But would they half-mast the flags here for a boarder, Mr. Smith?”
+
+“Why, certainly they would, if he was dead.”
+
+That seemed to size the country again.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The early twilight of a Sunday evening in Hamilton, Bermuda, is an
+alluring time. There is just enough of whispering breeze, fragrance of
+flowers, and sense of repose to raise one's thoughts heavenward; and
+just enough amateur piano music to keep him reminded of the other
+place. There are many venerable pianos in Hamilton, and they all play
+at twilight. Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical
+instruments--notably those of the violin--but it seems to set a piano's
+teeth on edge. Most of the music in vogue there is the same that those
+pianos prattled in their innocent infancy; and there is something very
+pathetic about it when they go over it now, in their asthmatic second
+childhood, dropping a note here and there where a tooth is gone.
+
+We attended evening service at the stately Episcopal church on the hill,
+where five or six hundred people, half of them white and the other
+half black, according to the usual Bermudian proportions; and all well
+dressed--a thing which is also usual in Bermuda and to be confidently
+expected. There was good music, which we heard, and doubtless--a good
+sermon, but there was a wonderful deal of coughing, and so only the high
+parts of the argument carried over it. As we came out, after service, I
+overheard one young girl say to another:
+
+“Why, you don't mean to say you pay duty on gloves and laces! I only pay
+postage; have them done up and sent in the Boston Advertiser.”
+
+There are those that believe that the most difficult thing to create
+is a woman who can comprehend that it is wrong to smuggle; and that an
+impossible thing to create is a woman who will not smuggle, whether or
+no, when she gets a chance. But these may be errors.
+
+We went wandering off toward the country, and were soon far down in
+the lonely black depths of a road that was roofed over with the dense
+foliage of a double rank of great cedars. There was no sound of any kind
+there; it was perfectly still. And it was so dark that one could detect
+nothing but somber outlines. We strode farther and farther down this
+tunnel, cheering the way with chat.
+
+Presently the chat took this shape: “How insensibly the character of the
+people and of a government makes its impress upon a stranger, and gives
+him a sense of security or of insecurity without his taking deliberate
+thought upon the matter or asking anybody a question! We have been in
+this land half a day; we have seen none but honest faces; we have noted
+the British flag flying, which means efficient government and good
+order; so without inquiry we plunge unarmed and with perfect confidence
+into this dismal place, which in almost any other country would swarm
+with thugs and garroters--”
+
+'Sh! What was that? Stealthy footsteps! Low voices! We gasp, we close up
+together, and wait. A vague shape glides out of the dusk and confronts
+us. A voice speaks--demands money!
+
+“A shilling, gentlemen, if you please, to help build the new Methodist
+church.”
+
+Blessed sound! Holy sound! We contribute with thankful avidity to the
+new Methodist church, and are happy to think how lucky it was that those
+little colored Sunday-school scholars did not seize upon everything
+we had with violence, before we recovered from our momentary helpless
+condition. By the light of cigars we write down the names of weightier
+philanthropists than ourselves on the contribution cards, and then pass
+on into the farther darkness, saying, What sort of a government do
+they call this, where they allow little black pious children, with
+contribution cards, to plunge out upon peaceable strangers in the dark
+and scare them to death?
+
+We prowled on several hours, sometimes by the seaside, sometimes inland,
+and finally managed to get lost, which is a feat that requires talent in
+Bermuda. I had on new shoes. They were No. 7's when I started, but were
+not more than 5's now, and still diminishing. I walked two hours in
+those shoes after that, before we reached home. Doubtless I could have
+the reader's sympathy for the asking. Many people have never had the
+headache or the toothache, and I am one of those myself; but everybody
+has worn tight shoes for two or three hours, and known the luxury of
+taking them off in a retired place and seeing his feet swell up and
+obscure the firmament. Once when I was a callow, bashful cub, I took a
+plain, unsentimental country girl to a comedy one night. I had known her
+a day; she seemed divine; I wore my new boots. At the end of the first
+half-hour she said, “Why do you fidget so with your feet?” I said, “Did
+I?” Then I put my attention there and kept still. At the end of another
+half-hour she said, “Why do you say, 'Yes, oh yes!' and 'Ha, ha, oh,
+certainly! very true!' to everything I say, when half the time those are
+entirely irrelevant answers?” I blushed, and explained that I had been a
+little absent-minded. At the end of another half-hour she said, “Please,
+why do you grin so steadfastly at vacancy, and yet look so sad?” I
+explained that I always did that when I was reflecting. An hour passed,
+and then she turned and contemplated me with her earnest eyes and said,
+“Why do you cry all the time?” I explained that very funny comedies
+always made me cry. At last human nature surrendered, and I secretly
+slipped my boots off. This was a mistake. I was not able to get them on
+any more. It was a rainy night; there were no omnibuses going our way;
+and as I walked home, burning up with shame, with the girl on one
+arm and my boots under the other, I was an object worthy of some
+compassion--especially in those moments of martyrdom when I had to
+pass through the glare that fell upon the pavement from street-lamps.
+Finally, this child of the forest said, “Where are your boots?” and
+being taken unprepared, I put a fitting finish to the follies of the
+evening with the stupid remark, “The higher classes do not wear them to
+the theater.”
+
+The Reverend had been an army chaplain during the war, and while we were
+hunting for a road that would lead to Hamilton he told a story about two
+dying soldiers which interested me in spite of my feet. He said that in
+the Potomac hospitals rough pine coffins were furnished by government,
+but that it was not always possible to keep up with the demand; so, when
+a man died, if there was no coffin at hand he was buried without one.
+One night, late, two soldiers lay dying in a ward. A man came in with
+a coffin on his shoulder, and stood trying to make up his mind which of
+these two poor fellows would be likely to need it first. Both of them
+begged for it with their fading eyes--they were past talking. Then one
+of them protruded a wasted hand from his blankets and made a feeble
+beckoning sign with the fingers, to signify, “Be a good fellow; put
+it under my bed, please.” The man did it, and left. The lucky soldier
+painfully turned himself in his bed until he faced the other warrior,
+raised himself partly on his elbow, and began to work up a mysterious
+expression of some kind in his face. Gradually, irksomely, but surely
+and steadily, it developed, and at last it took definite form as a
+pretty successful wink. The sufferer fell back exhausted with his
+labor, but bathed in glory. Now entered a personal friend of No. 2,
+the despoiled soldier. No. 2 pleaded with him with eloquent eyes, till
+presently he understood, and removed the coffin from under No. 1's bed
+and put it under No. 2's. No. 2 indicated his joy, and made some more
+signs; the friend understood again, and put his arm under No. 2's
+shoulders and lifted him partly up. Then the dying hero turned the dim
+exultation of his eye upon No. 1, and began a slow and labored work with
+his hands; gradually he lifted one hand up toward his face; it grew weak
+and dropped back again; once more he made the effort, but failed again.
+He took a rest; he gathered all the remnant of his strength, and this
+time he slowly but surely carried his thumb to the side of his nose,
+spread the gaunt fingers wide in triumph, and dropped back dead. That
+picture sticks by me yet. The “situation” is unique.
+
+The next morning, at what seemed a very early hour, the little white
+table-waiter appeared suddenly in my room and shot a single word out of
+himself “Breakfast!”
+
+This was a remarkable boy in many ways. He was about eleven years old;
+he had alert, intent black eyes; he was quick of movement; there was
+no hesitation, no uncertainty about him anywhere; there was a military
+decision in his lip, his manner, his speech, that was an astonishing
+thing to see in a little chap like him; he wasted no words; his answers
+always came so quick and brief that they seemed to be part of the
+question that had been asked instead of a reply to it. When he stood
+at table with his fly-brush, rigid, erect, his face set in a cast-iron
+gravity, he was a statue till he detected a dawning want in somebody's
+eye; then he pounced down, supplied it, and was instantly a statue
+again. When he was sent to the kitchen for anything, he marched upright
+till he got to the door; he turned hand-springs the rest of the way.
+
+“Breakfast!”
+
+I thought I would make one more effort to get some conversation out of
+this being.
+
+“Have you called the Reverend, or are--”
+
+“Yes s'r!”
+
+“Is it early, or is--”
+
+“Eight-five.”
+
+“Do you have to do all the 'chores,' or is there somebody to give you
+a--”
+
+“Colored girl.”
+
+“Is there only one parish in this island, or are there--”
+
+“Eight!”
+
+“Is the big church on the hill a parish church, or is it--”
+
+“Chapel-of-ease!”
+
+“Is taxation here classified into poll, parish, town, and--”
+
+“Don't know!”
+
+Before I could cudgel another question out of my head, he was below,
+hand-springing across the back yard. He had slid down the balusters,
+headfirst. I gave up trying to provoke a discussion with him. The
+essential element of discussion had been left out of him; his answers
+were so final and exact that they did not leave a doubt to hang
+conversation on. I suspect that there is the making of a mighty man or
+a mighty rascal in this boy--according to circumstances--but they are
+going to apprentice him to a carpenter. It is the way the world uses its
+opportunities.
+
+During this day and the next we took carriage drives about the island
+and over to the town of St. George's, fifteen or twenty miles away. Such
+hard, excellent roads to drive over are not to be found elsewhere out
+of Europe. An intelligent young colored man drove us, and acted as
+guide-book. In the edge of the town we saw five or six mountain-cabbage
+palms (atrocious name!) standing in a straight row, and equidistant from
+each other. These were not the largest or the tallest trees I have ever
+seen, but they were the stateliest, the most majestic. That row of
+them must be the nearest that nature has ever come to counterfeiting
+a colonnade. These trees are all the same height, say sixty feet;
+the trunks as gray as granite, with a very gradual and perfect taper;
+without sign of branch or knot or flaw; the surface not looking like
+bark, but like granite that has been dressed and not polished. Thus all
+the way up the diminishing shaft for fifty feet; then it begins to take
+the appearance of being closely wrapped, spool-fashion, with gray
+cord, or of having been turned in a lathe. Above this point there is an
+outward swell, and thence upward for six feet or more the cylinder is a
+bright, fresh green, and is formed of wrappings like those of an ear
+of green Indian corn. Then comes the great, spraying palm plume, also
+green. Other palm trees always lean out of the perpendicular, or have a
+curve in them. But the plumb-line could not detect a deflection in any
+individual of this stately row; they stand as straight as the colonnade
+of Baalbec; they have its great height, they have its gracefulness, they
+have its dignity; in moonlight or twilight, and shorn of their plumes,
+they would duplicate it.
+
+The birds we came across in the country were singularly tame; even that
+wild creature, the quail, would pick around in the grass at ease while
+we inspected it and talked about it at leisure. A small bird of the
+canary species had to be stirred up with the butt-end of the whip before
+it would move, and then it moved only a couple of feet. It is said that
+even the suspicious flea is tame and sociable in Bermuda, and will allow
+himself to be caught and caressed without misgivings. This should be
+taken with allowance, for doubtless there is more or less brag about it.
+In San Francisco they used to claim that their native flea could kick a
+child over, as if it were a merit in a flea to be able to do that; as if
+the knowledge of it trumpeted abroad ought to entice immigration. Such a
+thing in nine cases out of ten would be almost sure to deter a thinking
+man from coming.
+
+We saw no bugs or reptiles to speak of, and so I was thinking of saying
+in print, in a general way, that there were none at all; but one
+night after I had gone to bed, the Reverend came into my room carrying
+something, and asked, “Is this your boot?” I said it was, and he said he
+had met a spider going off with it. Next morning he stated that just at
+dawn the same spider raised his window and was coming in to get a shirt,
+but saw him and fled.
+
+I inquired, “Did he get the shirt?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“How did you know it was a shirt he was after?”
+
+“I could see it in his eye.”
+
+We inquired around, but could hear of no Bermudian spider capable of
+doing these things. Citizens said that their largest spiders could not
+more than spread their legs over an ordinary saucer, and that they had
+always been considered honest. Here was testimony of a clergyman against
+the testimony of mere worldlings--interested ones, too. On the whole, I
+judged it best to lock up my things.
+
+Here and there on the country roads we found lemon, papaw, orange, lime,
+and fig trees; also several sorts of palms, among them the cocoa, the
+date, and the palmetto. We saw some bamboos forty feet high, with stems
+as thick as a man's arm. Jungles of the mangrove tree stood up out of
+swamps; propped on their interlacing roots as upon a tangle of stilts.
+In drier places the noble tamarind sent down its grateful cloud of
+shade. Here and there the blossomy tamarisk adorned the roadside. There
+was a curious gnarled and twisted black tree, without a single leaf on
+it. It might have passed itself off for a dead apple tree but for the
+fact that it had a star-like, red-hot flower sprinkled sparsely over
+its person. It had the scattery red glow that a constellation might
+have when glimpsed through smoked glass. It is possible that our
+constellations have been so constructed as to be invisible through
+smoked glass; if this is so it is a great mistake.
+
+We saw a tree that bears grapes, and just as calmly and unostentatiously
+as a vine would do it. We saw an India-rubber tree, but out of season,
+possibly, so there were no shoes on it, nor suspenders, nor anything
+that a person would properly expect to find there. This gave it an
+impressively fraudulent look. There was exactly one mahogany tree on the
+island. I know this to be reliable, because I saw a man who said he had
+counted it many a time and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a
+harelip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel.
+Such men are all too few.
+
+One's eye caught near and far the pink cloud of the oleander and the
+red blaze of the pomegranate blossom. In one piece of wild wood the
+morning-glory vines had wrapped the trees to their very tops, and
+decorated them all over with couples and clusters of great bluebells--a
+fine and striking spectacle, at a little distance. But the dull cedar is
+everywhere, and is the prevailing foliage. One does not appreciate how
+dull it is until the varnished, bright green attire of the infrequent
+lemon tree pleasantly intrudes its contrast. In one thing Bermuda is
+eminently tropical--was in May, at least--the unbrilliant, slightly
+faded, unrejoicing look of the landscape. For forests arrayed in a
+blemishless magnificence of glowing green foliage that seems to exult in
+its own existence and can move the beholder to an enthusiasm that
+will make him either shout or cry, one must go to countries that have
+malignant winters.
+
+We saw scores of colored farmers digging their crops of potatoes
+and onions, their wives and children helping--entirely contented and
+comfortable, if looks go for anything. We never met a man, or woman, or
+child anywhere in this sunny island who seemed to be unprosperous, or
+discontented, or sorry about anything. This sort of monotony became very
+tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire
+nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing. We felt the
+lack of something in this community--a vague, an indefinable, an elusive
+something, and yet a lack. But after considerable thought we made out
+what it was--tramps. Let them go there, right now, in a body. It is
+utterly virgin soil. Passage is cheap. Every true patriot in America
+will help buy tickets. Whole armies of these excellent beings can be
+spared from our midst and our polls; they will find a delicious climate
+and a green, kind-hearted people. There are potatoes and onions for all,
+and a generous welcome for the first batch that arrives, and elegant
+graves for the second.
+
+It was the Early Rose potato the people were digging. Later in the
+year they have another crop, which they call the Garnet. We buy their
+potatoes (retail) at fifteen dollars a barrel; and those colored farmers
+buy ours for a song, and live on them. Havana might exchange cigars with
+Connecticut in the same advantageous way, if she thought of it.
+
+We passed a roadside grocery with a sign up, “Potatoes Wanted.” An
+ignorant stranger, doubtless. He could not have gone thirty steps from
+his place without finding plenty of them.
+
+In several fields the arrowroot crop was already sprouting. Bermuda used
+to make a vast annual profit out of this staple before firearms came
+into such general use.
+
+The island is not large. Somewhere in the interior a man ahead of us
+had a very slow horse. I suggested that we had better go by him; but
+the driver said the man had but a little way to go. I waited to see,
+wondering how he could know. Presently the man did turn down another
+road. I asked, “How did you know he would?”
+
+“Because I knew the man, and where he lived.”
+
+I asked him, satirically, if he knew everybody in the island; he
+answered, very simply, that he did. This gives a body's mind a good
+substantial grip on the dimensions of the place.
+
+At the principal hotel at St. George's, a young girl, with a sweet,
+serious face, said we could not be furnished with dinner, because we had
+not been expected, and no preparation had been made. Yet it was still an
+hour before dinner-time. We argued, she yielded not; we supplicated,
+she was serene. The hotel had not been expecting an inundation of two
+people, and so it seemed that we should have to go home dinnerless. I
+said we were not very hungry; a fish would do. My little maid answered,
+it was not the market-day for fish. Things began to look serious; but
+presently the boarder who sustained the hotel came in, and when the case
+was laid before him he was cheerfully willing to divide. So we had much
+pleasant chat at table about St. George's chief industry, the repairing
+of damaged ships; and in between we had a soup that had something in it
+that seemed to taste like the hereafter, but it proved to be only pepper
+of a particularly vivacious kind. And we had an iron-clad chicken that
+was deliciously cooked, but not in the right way. Baking was not
+the thing to convince this sort. He ought to have been put through a
+quartz-mill until the “tuck” was taken out of him, and then boiled till
+we came again. We got a good deal of sport out of him, but not enough
+sustenance to leave the victory on our side. No matter; we had potatoes
+and a pie and a sociable good time. Then a ramble through the town,
+which is a quaint one, with interesting, crooked streets, and narrow,
+crooked lanes, with here and there a grain of dust. Here, as in
+Hamilton, the dwellings had Venetian blinds of a very sensible pattern.
+They were not double shutters, hinged at the sides, but a single broad
+shutter, hinged at the top; you push it outward, from the bottom, and
+fasten it at any angle required by the sun or desired by yourself.
+
+All about the island one sees great white scars on the hill-slopes.
+These are dished spaces where the soil has been scraped off and the
+coral exposed and glazed with hard whitewash. Some of these are a
+quarter-acre in size. They catch and carry the rainfall to reservoirs;
+for the wells are few and poor, and there are no natural springs and no
+brooks.
+
+They say that the Bermuda climate is mild and equable, with never any
+snow or ice, and that one may be very comfortable in spring clothing the
+year round, there. We had delightful and decided summer weather in May,
+with a flaming sun that permitted the thinnest of raiment, and yet there
+was a constant breeze; consequently we were never discomforted by heat.
+At four or five in the afternoon the mercury began to go down, and then
+it became necessary to change to thick garments. I went to St. George's
+in the morning clothed in the thinnest of linen, and reached home at
+five in the afternoon with two overcoats on. The nights are said to be
+always cool and bracing. We had mosquito-nets, and the Reverend said the
+mosquitoes persecuted him a good deal. I often heard him slapping and
+banging at these imaginary creatures with as much zeal as if they had
+been real. There are no mosquitoes in the Bermudas in May.
+
+The poet Thomas Moore spent several months in Bermuda more than seventy
+years ago. He was sent out to be registrar of the admiralty. I am
+not quite clear as to the function of a registrar of the admiralty of
+Bermuda, but I think it is his duty to keep a record of all the admirals
+born there. I will inquire into this. There was not much doing in
+admirals, and Moore got tired and went away. A reverently preserved
+souvenir of him is still one of the treasures of the islands: I gathered
+the idea, vaguely, that it was a jug, but was persistently thwarted in
+the twenty-two efforts I made to visit it. However, it was no matter,
+for I found out afterward that it was only a chair.
+
+There are several “sights” in the Bermudas, of course, but they are
+easily avoided. This is a great advantage--one cannot have it in Europe.
+Bermuda is the right country for a jaded man to “loaf” in. There are
+no harassments; the deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's
+body and bones and give his conscience a rest, and chloroform the legion
+of invisible small devils that are always trying to whitewash his hair.
+A good many Americans go there about the first of March and remain until
+the early spring weeks have finished their villainies at home.
+
+The Bermudians are hoping soon to have telegraphic communication with
+the world. But even after they shall have acquired this curse it will
+still be a good country to go to for a vacation, for there are charming
+little islets scattered about the inclosed sea where one could live
+secure from interruption. The telegraph-boy would have to come in a
+boat, and one could easily kill him while he was making his landing.
+
+We had spent four days in Bermuda--three bright ones out of doors and
+one rainy one in the house, we being disappointed about getting a yacht
+for a sail; and now our furlough was ended, and we entered into the ship
+again and sailed homeward.
+
+We made the run home to New York quarantine in three days and five
+hours, and could have gone right along up to the city if we had had a
+health permit. But health permits are not granted after seven in the
+evening, partly because a ship cannot be inspected and overhauled
+with exhaustive, thoroughness except in daylight, and partly because
+health-officers are liable to catch cold if they expose themselves to
+the night air. Still, you can buy a permit after hours for five dollars
+extra, and the officer will do the inspecting next week. Our ship and
+passengers lay under expense and in humiliating captivity all night,
+under the very nose of the little official reptile who is supposed to
+protect New York from pestilence by his vigilant “inspections.” This
+imposing rigor gave everybody a solemn and awful idea of the beneficent
+watchfulness of our government, and there were some who wondered if
+anything finer could be found in other countries.
+
+In the morning we were all a-tiptoe to witness the intricate ceremony
+of inspecting the ship. But it was a disappointing thing. The
+health-officer's tug ranged alongside for a moment, our purser handed
+the lawful three-dollar permit fee to the health-officer's bootblack,
+who passed us a folded paper in a forked stick, and away we went. The
+entire “inspection” did not occupy thirteen seconds.
+
+The health-officer's place is worth a hundred thousand dollars a year
+to him. His system of inspection is perfect, and therefore cannot be
+improved on; but it seems to me that his system of collecting his fees
+might be amended. For a great ship to lie idle all night is a most
+costly loss of time; for her passengers to have to do the same thing
+works to them the same damage, with the addition of an amount of
+exasperation and bitterness of soul that the spectacle of that
+health-officer's ashes on a shovel could hardly sweeten. Now why would
+it not be better and simpler to let the ships pass in unmolested, and
+the fees and permits be exchanged once a year by post.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Rambling Notes of an Idle
+Excursion, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
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