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+Project Gutenberg Etext Rambling Idle Excursion, by Mark Twain
+#43 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
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+Title: Rambling Idle Excursion
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3182]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 02/06/01]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext Rambling Idle Excursion, by Mark Twain
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+
+Rambling Idle Excursion
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+SOME RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION
+
+
+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 everage, 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
+rather 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 site, 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 Niggling 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 site 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 matter
+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 mile 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 see a
+governor before.  I looked and looked at that face and then all of a
+sudden it popped on me!  But 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 say.
+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 knuckle: 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
+inroad; 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 watches 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 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.
+
+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
+gut 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 every body
+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 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 Project Gutenberg Etext Rambling Idle Excursion, by Mark Twain
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Rambling Idle Excursion, by Mark Twain
+#43 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
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+Title: Rambling Idle Excursion
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3182]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 6, 2001]
+[Most recently updated: November 29, 2001]
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+Edition: 11
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Rambling Idle Excursion, by Mark Twain
+*********This file should be named mtrid11.txt or mtrid11.zip********
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+
+SOME RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+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 everage, 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
+rather 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 site, 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 Niggling 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 site 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 matter
+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 mile 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 see a
+governor before.  I looked and looked at that face and then all of a
+sudden it popped on me!  But 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 say.
+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 knuckle: 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
+inroad; 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 watches 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 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.
+
+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
+gut 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 every body
+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 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 this Project Gutenberg Etext of Rambling Idle Excursion
+by Mark Twain
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion
+#43 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
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+
+
+Title: Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [EBook #3182]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 6, 2001]
+[This file was last updated on November 14, 2002]
+
+Edition: 12
+
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+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+Extensive proofing of this file was done by Trevor Carlson
+
+
+
+
+
+SOME RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+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 everage, 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
+rather 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 site, 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 Niggling 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 site 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 matter
+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 mile 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 see a
+governor before.  I looked and looked at that face and then all of a
+sudden it popped on me!  But 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 say.
+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 knuckle: 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
+inroad; 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 watches 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 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.
+
+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 every body
+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 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 RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION ***
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