This was done. One sweet warbler after another charmed the young king's

ear and was removed to make way for another candidate. The precious

minutes slipped by; among so many bewitching songsters he found it hard

to choose, and all the harder because the promised penalty for an error

was so terrible that it unsettled his judgment and made him afraid to

trust his own ears. He grew nervous and his face showed distress. His

ministers saw this, for they never took their eyes from him a moment.

Now they began to say in their hearts:

"He has lost courage--the cool head is gone--he will err--he and his

dynasty and his people are doomed!"

At the end of an hour the king sat silent awhile, and then said:

"Bring back the linnet."

The linnet trilled forth her jubilant music. In the midst of it the king

was about to uplift his scepter in sign of choice, but checked himself

and said:

"But let us be sure. Bring back the thrush; let them sing together."

The thrush was brought, and the two birds poured out their marvels of

song together. The king wavered, then his inclination began to settle

and strengthen--one could see it in his countenance. Hope budded in the

hearts of the old ministers, their pulses began to beat quicker, the

scepter began to rise slowly, when: There was a hideous interruption!

It was a sound like this--just at the door:

"Waw . . . he! waw . . . he! waw-he!-waw

he!-waw-he!"

Everybody was sorely startled--and enraged at himself for showing it.

The next instant the dearest, sweetest, prettiest little peasant-maid of

nine years came tripping in, her brown eyes glowing with childish

eagerness; but when she saw that august company and those angry faces she

stopped and hung her head and put her poor coarse apron to her eyes.

Nobody gave her welcome, none pitied her. Presently she looked up

timidly through her tears, and said:

"My lord the king, I pray you pardon me, for I meant no wrong. I have no

father and no mother, but I have a goat and a donkey, and they are all in

all to me. My goat gives me the sweetest milk, and when my dear good

donkey brays it seems to me there is no music like to it. So when my

lord the king's jester said the sweetest singer among all the animals

should save the crown and nation, and moved me to bring him here--"

All the court burst into a rude laugh, and the child fled away crying,

without trying to finish her speech. The chief minister gave a private

order that she and her disastrous donkey be flogged beyond the precincts

of the palace and commanded to come within them no more.

Then the trial of the birds was resumed. The two birds sang their best,

but the scepter lay motionless in the king's hand. Hope died slowly out

in the breasts of all. An hour went by; two hours, still no decision.

The day waned to its close, and the waiting multitudes outside the palace

grew crazed with anxiety and apprehension. The twilight came on, the

shadows fell deeper and deeper. The king and his court could no longer

see each other's faces. No one spoke--none called for lights. The great

trial had been made; it had failed; each and all wished to hide their

faces from the light and cover up their deep trouble in their own hearts.

Finally-hark! A rich, full strain of the divinest melody streamed forth

from a remote part of the hall the nightingale's voice!

"Up!" shouted the king, "let all the bells make proclamation to the

people, for the choice is made and we have not erred. King, dynasty,

and nation are saved. From henceforth let the nightingale be honored

throughout the land forever. And publish it among all the people that

whosoever shall insult a nightingale, or injure it, shall suffer death.

The king hath spoken."

All that little world was drunk with joy. The castle and the city blazed

with bonfires all night long, the people danced and drank and sang; and

the triumphant clamor of the bells never ceased.

From that day the nightingale was a sacred bird. Its song was heard in

every house; the poets wrote its praises; the painters painted it; its

sculptured image adorned every arch and turret and fountain and public

building. It was even taken into the king's councils; and no grave

matter of state was decided until the soothsayers had laid the thing

before the state nightingale and translated to the ministry what it was

that the bird had sung about it.

II

The young king was very fond of the chase. When the summer was come he

rode forth with hawk and hound, one day, in a brilliant company of his

nobles. He got separated from them by and by, in a great forest, and

took what he imagined a neat cut, to find them again; but it was a

mistake. He rode on and on, hopefully at first, but with sinking courage

finally. Twilight came on, and still he was plunging through a lonely

and unknown land. Then came a catastrophe. In the dim light he forced

his horse through a tangled thicket overhanging a steep and rocky

declivity. When horse and rider reached the bottom, the former had a

broken neck and the latter a broken leg. The poor little king lay there

suffering agonies of pain, and each hour seemed a long month to him.

He kept his ear strained to hear any sound that might promise hope of

rescue; but he heard no voice, no sound of horn or bay of hound. So at

last he gave up all hope, and said, "Let death come, for come it must."

Just then the deep, sweet song of a nightingale swept across the still

wastes of the night.

"Saved!" the king said. "Saved! It is the sacred bird, and the prophecy

is come true. The gods themselves protected me from error in the

choice."

He could hardly contain his joy; he could not word his gratitude. Every

few moments, now he thought he caught the sound of approaching succor.

But each time it was a disappointment; no succor came. The dull hours

drifted on. Still no help came--but still the sacred bird sang on. He

began to have misgivings about his choice, but he stifled them. Toward

dawn the bird ceased. The morning came, and with it thirst and hunger;

but no succor. The day waxed and waned. At last the king cursed the

nightingale.

Immediately the song of the thrush came from out the wood. The king said

in his heart, "This was the true-bird--my choice was false--succor will

come now."

But it did not come. Then he lay many hours insensible. When he came to

himself, a linnet was singing. He listened with apathy. His faith was

gone. "These birds," he said, "can bring no help; I and my house and my

people are doomed." He turned him about to die; for he was grown very

feeble from hunger and thirst and suffering, and felt that his end was

near. In truth, he wanted to die, and be released from pain. For long

hours he lay without thought or feeling or motion. Then his senses

returned. The dawn of the third morning was breaking. Ah, the world

seemed very beautiful to those worn eyes. Suddenly a great longing to

live rose up in the lad's heart, and from his soul welled a deep and

fervent prayer that Heaven would have mercy upon him and let him see his

home and his friends once more. In that instant a soft, a faint, a

far-off sound, but oh, how inexpressibly sweet to his waiting ear, came

floating out of the distance:

"Waw . . . he! waw . . . he! waw-he!--waw-he!--waw-he!"

"That, oh, that song is sweeter, a thousand times sweeter than the voice

of the nightingale, thrush, or linnet, for it brings not mere hope, but

certainty of succor; and now, indeed, am I saved! The sacred singer has

chosen itself, as the oracle intended; the prophecy is fulfilled, and my

life, my house, and my people are redeemed. The ass shall be sacred from

this day!"

The divine music grew nearer and nearer, stronger and stronger and ever

sweeter and sweeter to the perishing sufferer's ear. Down the declivity

the docile little donkey wandered, cropping herbage and singing as he

went; and when at last he saw the dead horse and the wounded king, he

came and snuffed at them with simple and marveling curiosity. The king

petted him, and he knelt down as had been his wont when his little

mistress desired to mount. With great labor and pain the lad drew

himself upon the creature's back, and held himself there by aid of the

generous ears. The ass went singing forth from the place and carried the

king to the little peasant-maid's hut. She gave him her pallet for a

bed, refreshed him with goat's milk, and then flew to tell the great news

to the first scouting-party of searchers she might meet.

The king got well. His first act was to proclaim the sacredness and

inviolability of the ass; his second was to add this particular ass to

his cabinet and make him chief minister of the crown; his third was to

have all the statues and effigies of nightingales throughout his kingdom

destroyed, and replaced by statues and effigies of the sacred donkey;

and, his fourth was to announce that when the little peasant maid should

reach her fifteenth year he would make her his queen and he kept his

word.

Such is the legend. This explains why the moldering image of the ass

adorns all these old crumbling walls and arches; and it explains why,

during many centuries, an ass was always the chief minister in that royal

cabinet, just as is still the case in most cabinets to this day; and it

also explains why, in that little kingdom, during many centuries, all

great poems, all great speeches, all great books, all public solemnities,

and all royal proclamations, always began with these stirring words:

"Waw . . . he! waw . . . he!--waw he! Waw-he!"

SPEECH ON THE BABIES

AT THE BANQUET, IN CHICAGO, GIVEN BY THE ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE TO THEIR

FIRST COMMANDER, GENERAL U. S. GRANT, NOVEMBER, 1879

The fifteenth regular toast was "The Babies--as they comfort us in

our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities."

I like that. We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We

have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast

works down to the babies, we stand on common ground. It is a shame that

for a thousand years the world's banquets have utterly ignored the baby,

as if he didn't amount to anything. If you will stop and think a minute

--if you will go back fifty or one hundred years to your early married

life and recontemplate your first baby--you will remember that he

amounted to a great deal, and even something over. You soldiers all know

that when the little fellow arrived at family headquarters you had to

hand in your resignation. He took entire command. You became his

lackey, his mere body servant, and you had to stand around, too. He was

not a commander who made allowances for time, distance, weather, or

anything else. You had to execute his order whether it was possible or

not. And there was only one form of marching in his manual of tactics,

and that was the double-quick. He treated you with every sort of

insolence and disrespect, and the bravest of you didn't dare to say a

word. You could face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give

back blow for blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your

hair, and twisted your nose, you had to take it. When the thunders of

war were sounding in your ears you set your faces toward the batteries,

and advanced with steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his

war-whoop you advanced in the other direction, and mighty glad of the

chance, too. When he called for soothing-syrup, did you venture to throw

out any side remarks about certain services being unbecoming an officer

and a gentleman? No. You got up and got it. When he ordered his

pap-bottle and it was not warm, did you talk back? Not you. You went to

work and warmed it. You even descended so far in your menial office as

to take a suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was

right--three parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the

colic, and a drop of peppermint to kill those hiccoughs. I can taste

that stuff yet. And how many things you learned as you went along!

Sentimental young folks still take stock in that beautiful old saying

that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are

whispering to him. Very pretty, but too thin--simply wind on the

stomach, my friends. If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual

hour, two o'clock in the morning, didn't you rise up promptly and remark,

with a mental addition which would not improve a Sunday-school book much,

that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself? Oh!

you were under good discipline, and as you went fluttering up and down

the room in your undress uniform, you not only prattled undignified

baby-talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing!

--"Rock-a-by baby in the treetop," for instance. What a spectacle for an

Army of the Tennessee! And what an affliction for the neighbors, too;

for it is not everybody within a mile around that likes military music at

three in the morning. And when you had been keeping this sort of thing

up two or three hours, and your little velvet-head intimated that nothing

suited him like exercise and noise, what did you do? ["Go on!"] You

simply went on until you dropped in the last ditch. The idea that a baby

doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front

yard full by itself. One baby can furnish more business than you and

your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising,

irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities. Do what you please, you

can't make him stay on the reservation. Sufficient unto the day is one

baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for

twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot. And there ain't any real

difference between triplets and an insurrection.

Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognize the importance of

the babies. Think what is in store for the present crop! Fifty years

from now we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still

survive (and let us hope it may), will be floating over a Republic

numbering 200,000,000 souls, according to the settled laws of our

increase. Our present schooner of State will have grown into a political

leviathan--a Great Eastern. The cradled babies of to-day will be on

deck. Let them be well trained, for we are going to leave a big contract

on their hands. Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in

the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred

things, if we could know which ones they are. In one of them cradles the

unconscious Farragut of the future is at this moment teething--think of

it!--and putting in a world of dead earnest, unarticulated, but perfectly

justifiable profanity over it, too. In another the future renowned

astronomer is blinking at the shining Milky Way with but a languid

interest--poor little chap!--and wondering what has become of that other

one they call the wet-nurse. In another the future great historian is

lying--and doubtless will continue to lie until his earthly mission is

ended. In another the future President is busying himself with no

profounder problem of state than what the mischief has become of his hair

so early; and in a mighty array of other cradles there are now some

60,000 future office-seekers, getting ready to furnish him occasion to

grapple with that same old problem a second time. And in still one

more cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious

commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his

approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole

strategic mind at this moment to trying to find out some way to get his

big toe into his mouth--an achievement which, meaning no disrespect, the

illustrious guest of this evening turned his entire attention to some

fifty-six years ago; and if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there

are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.

SPEECH ON THE WEATHER

AT THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY'S SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, NEW YORK CITY

The next toast was: "The Oldest Inhabitant--The Weather of New

England."

Who can lose it and forget it?

Who can have it and regret it?

Be interposes 'twixt us Twain.

Merchant of Venice.

To this Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) replied as follows:--

I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in

New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it

must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and

learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted

to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take

their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is a sumptuous

variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's

admiration--and regret. The weather is always doing something there;

always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and

trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through

more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have

counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of

four-and-twenty hours. It was I that made the fame and fortune of that

man that had that marvelous collection of weather on exhibition at the

Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners. He was going to travel all

over the world and get specimens from all the climes. I said, "Don't you

do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day." I told him

what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity. Well, he

came and he made his collection in four days. As to variety, why, he

confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never

heard of before. And as to quantity--well, after he had picked out and

discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not only had weather

enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to

deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor. The people of

New England are by nature patient and forbearing, but there are some

things which they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets

for writing about "Beautiful Spring." These are generally casual

visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and

cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring. And so the

first thing they know the opportunity to inquire how they feel has

permanently gone by. Old Probabilities has a mighty reputation for

accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You take up the

paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off what to-day's

weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States,

in the Wisconsin region. See him sail along in the joy and pride of his

power till he gets to New England, and then see his tail drop. He

doesn't know what the weather is going to be in New England. Well, he

mulls over it, and by and by he gets out something about like this:

Probable northeast to southwest minds, varying to the southward and

westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer

swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail,

and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and

lightning. Then he jots down this postscript from his wandering mind, to

cover accidents: "But it is possible that the program may be wholly

changed in the mean time." Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New

England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one

thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of

it--a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the

procession is going to move first. You fix up for the drought; you leave

your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned.

You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under,

and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you

know you get struck by lightning. These are great disappointments; but

they can't be helped. The lightning there is peculiar; it is so

convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that

thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd think it was something

valuable, and a Congressman had been there. And the thunder. When the

thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape and saw, and key up the

instruments for the performance, strangers say, "Why, what awful thunder

you have here!" But when the baton is raised and the real concert

begins, you'll find that stranger down in the cellar with his head in the

ash-barrel. Now as to the size of the weather in New England lengthways,

I mean. It is utterly disproportioned to the size of that little

country. Half the time, when it is packed as full as it can stick, you

will see that New England weather sticking out beyond the edges and

projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring

states. She can't hold a tenth part of her weather. You can see cracks

all about where she has strained herself trying to do it. I could speak

volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I

will give but a single specimen. I like to hear rain on a tin roof.

So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well,

sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No, sir; skips it every

time. Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to do honor to the

New England weather--no language could do it justice. But, after all,

there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you

please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would not like to

part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still

have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its

bullying vagaries--the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice

from the bottom to the top--ice that is as bright and clear as crystal;

when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and

the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond

plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns

all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and

flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again

with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and

green to gold--the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of

dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest

possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable

magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.

CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

--[Being part of a chapter which was crowded out of "A Tramp Abroad."--

M.T.]

There was as Englishman in our compartment, and he complimented me on

--on what? But you would never guess. He complimented me on my English.

He said Americans in general did not speak the English language as

correctly as I did. I said I was obliged to him for his compliment,

since I knew he meant it for one, but that I was not fairly entitled to

it, for I did not speak English at all--I only spoke American.

He laughed, and said it was a distinction without a difference. I said

no, the difference was not prodigious, but still it was considerable.

We fell into a friendly dispute over the matter. I put my case as well

as I could, and said:

"The languages were identical several generations ago, but our changed

conditions and the spread of our people far to the south and far to the

west have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced

new words among us and changed the meanings of many old ones. English

people talk through their noses; we do not. We say know, English people

say nao; we say cow, the Briton says kaow; we--"

"Oh, come! that is pure Yankee; everybody knows that."

"Yes, it is pure Yankee; that is true. One cannot hear it in America

outside of the little corner called New England, which is Yankee land.

The English themselves planted it there, two hundred and fifty years ago,

and there it remains; it has never spread. But England talks through her

nose yet; the Londoner and the backwoods New-Englander pronounce 'know'

and 'cow' alike, and then the Briton unconsciously satirizes himself by

making fun of the Yankee's pronunciation."

We argued this point at some length; nobody won; but no matter, the fact

remains Englishmen say nao and kaow for "know" and "cow," and that is

what the rustic inhabitant of a very small section of America does.

"You conferred your 'a' upon New England, too, and there it remains; it

has not traveled out of the narrow limits of those six little states in

all these two hundred and fifty years. All England uses it, New

England's small population--say four millions--use it, but we have

forty-five millions who do not use it. You say 'glahs of wawtah,' so

does New England; at least, New England says 'glahs.' America at large

flattens the 'a', and says 'glass of water.' These sounds are pleasanter

than yours; you may think they are not right--well, in English they are

not right, but 'American' they are. You say 'flahsk' and 'bahsket,' and

'jackahss'; we say 'flask,' 'basket,' 'jackass'--sounding the 'a' as it

is in 'tallow,' 'fallow,' and so on. Up to as late as 1847 Mr. Webster's

Dictionary had the impudence to still pronounce 'basket' bahsket, when he

knew that outside of his little New England all America shortened the 'a'

and paid no attention to his English broadening of it. However, it called

itself an English Dictionary, so it was proper enough that it should

stick to English forms, perhaps. It still calls itself an English

Dictionary today, but it has quietly ceased to pronounce 'basket' as if

it were spelt 'bahsket.' In the American language the 'h' is respected;

the 'h' is not dropped or added improperly."

"The same is the case in England--I mean among the educated classes, of

course."

"Yes, that is true; but a nation's language is a very large matter.

It is not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful;

the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be

considered also. Your uneducated masses speak English, you will not deny

that; our uneducated masses speak American it won't be fair for you to

deny that, for you can see, yourself, that when your stable-boy says,

'It isn't the 'unting that 'urts the 'orse, but the 'ammer, 'ammer,

'ammer on the 'ard 'ighway,' and our stable-boy makes the same remark

without suffocating a single h, these two people are manifestly talking

two different languages. But if the signs are to be trusted, even your

educated classes used to drop the 'h.' They say humble, now, and heroic,

and historic etc., but I judge that they used to drop those h's because

your writers still keep up the fashion of patting an before those words

instead of a. This is what Mr. Darwin might call a 'rudimentary' sign

that as an was justifiable once, and useful when your educated classes

used to say 'umble, and 'eroic, and 'istorical. Correct writers of the

American language do not put an before three words."

The English gentleman had something to say upon this matter, but never

mind what he said--I'm not arguing his case. I have him at a

disadvantage, now. I proceeded:

"In England you encourage an orator by exclaiming, 'H'yaah! 'yaah!'

We pronounce it heer in some sections, 'h'yer' in others, and so on; but

our whites do not say 'h'yaah,' pronouncing the a's like the a in ah.

I have heard English ladies say 'don't you'--making two separate and

distinct words of it; your Mr. Burnand has satirized it. But we always

say 'dontchu.' This is much better. Your ladies say, 'Oh, it's oful

nice!' Ours say, 'Oh, it's awful nice!' We say, 'Four hundred,' you say

'For'--as in the word or. Your clergymen speak of 'the Lawd,' ours of

'the Lord'; yours speak of 'the gawds of the heathen,' ours of 'the gods

of the heathen.' When you are exhausted, you say you are 'knocked up.'

We don't. When you say you will do a thing 'directly,' you mean

'immediately'; in the American language--generally speaking--the word

signifies 'after a little.' When you say 'clever,' you mean 'capable';

with us the word used to mean 'accommodating,' but I don't know what it

means now. Your word 'stout' means 'fleshy'; our word 'stout' usually

means 'strong.' Your words 'gentleman' and 'lady' have a very restricted

meaning; with us they include the barmaid, butcher, burglar, harlot, and

horse-thief. You say, 'I haven't got any stockings on,' 'I haven't got

any memory,' 'I haven't got any money in my purse; we usually say, 'I

haven't any stockings on,' 'I haven't any memory!' 'I haven't any money

in my purse.' You say 'out of window'; we always put in a the. If one

asks 'How old is that man?' the Briton answers, 'He will be about forty';

in the American language we should say, 'He is about forty.' However,

I won't tire you, sir; but if I wanted to, I could pile up differences

here until I not only convinced you that English and American are

separate languages, but that when I speak my native tongue in its utmost

purity an Englishman can't understand me at all."

"I don't wish to flatter you, but it is about all I can do to understand

you now."

That was a very pretty compliment, and it put us on the pleasantest terms

directly--I use the word in the English sense.

[Later--1882. Esthetes in many of our schools are now beginning to teach

the pupils to broaden the 'a,' and to say "don't you," in the elegant

foreign way.]

ROGERS

This Man Rogers happened upon me and introduced himself at the town

of -----, in the South of England, where I stayed awhile. His stepfather

had married a distant relative of mine who was afterward hanged; and so

he seemed to think a blood relationship existed between us. He came in

every day and sat down and talked. Of all the bland, serene human

curiosities I ever saw, I think he was the chiefest. He desired to look

at my new chimney-pot hat. I was very willing, for I thought he would

notice the name of the great Oxford Street hatter in it, and respect me

accordingly. But he turned it about with a sort of grave compassion,

pointed out two or three blemishes, and said that I, being so recently

arrived, could not be expected to know where to supply myself. Said he

would send me the address of his hatter. Then he said, "Pardon me," and

proceeded to cut a neat circle of red tissue paper; daintily notched the

edges of it; took the mucilage and pasted it in my hat so as to cover the

manufacturer's name. He said, "No one will know now where you got it.

I will send you a hat-tip of my hatter, and you can paste it over this

tissue circle." It was the calmest, coolest thing--I never admired a man

so much in my life. Mind, he did this while his own hat sat offensively

near our noses, on the table--an ancient extinguisher of the "slouch"

pattern, limp and shapeless with age, discolored by vicissitudes of the

weather, and banded by an equator of bear's grease that had stewed

through.

Another time he examined my coat. I had no terrors, for over my tailor's

door was the legend, "By Special Appointment Tailor to H. R. H. the

Prince of Wales," etc. I did not know at the time that the most of the

tailor shops had the same sign out, and that whereas it takes nine

tailors to make an ordinary man, it takes a hundred and fifty to make a

prince. He was full of compassion for my coat. Wrote down the address

of his tailor for me. Did not tell me to mention my nom de plume and the

tailor would put his best work on my garment, as complimentary people

sometimes do, but said his tailor would hardly trouble himself for an

unknown person (unknown person, when I thought I was so celebrated in

England!--that was the cruelest cut), but cautioned me to mention his

name, and it would be all right. Thinking to be facetious, I said:

"But he might sit up all night and injure his health."

"Well, let him," said Rogers; "I've done enough for him, for him to show

some appreciation of it."

I might as well have tried to disconcert a mummy with my facetiousness.

Said Rogers: "I get all my coats there--they're the only coats fit to be

seen in."

I made one more attempt. I said, "I wish you had brought one with you

--I would like to look at it."

"Bless your heart, haven't I got one on?--this article is Morgan's make."

I examined it. The coat had been bought ready-made, of a Chatham Street

Jew, without any question--about 1848. It probably cost four dollars

when it was new. It was ripped, it was frayed, it was napless and

greasy. I could not resist showing him where it was ripped. It so

affected him that I was almost sorry I had done it. First he seemed

plunged into a bottomless abyss of grief. Then he roused himself, made

a feint with his hands as if waving off the pity of a nation, and said

--with what seemed to me a manufactured emotion--"No matter; no matter;

don't mind me; do not bother about it. I can get another."

When he was thoroughly restored, so that he could examine the rip and

command his feelings, he said, ah, now he understood it--his servant must

have done it while dressing him that morning.

His servant! There was something awe-inspiring in effrontery like this.

Nearly every day he interested himself in some article of my clothing.

One would hardly have expected this sort of infatuation in a man who

always wore the same suit, and it a suit that seemed coeval with the

Conquest.

It was an unworthy ambition, perhaps, but I did wish I could make this

man admire something about me or something I did--you would have felt the

same way. I saw my opportunity: I was about to return to London, and had

"listed" my soiled linen for the wash. It made quite an imposing

mountain in the corner of the room--fifty-four pieces. I hoped he would

fancy it was the accumulation of a single week. I took up the wash-list,

as if to see that it was all right, and then tossed it on the table, with

pretended forgetfulness. Sure enough, he took it up and ran his eye

along down to the grand total. Then he said, "You get off easy," and

laid it down again.

His gloves were the saddest ruin, but he told me where I could get some

like them. His shoes would hardly hold walnuts without leaking, but he

liked to put his feet up on the mantelpiece and contemplate them.

He wore a dim glass breastpin, which he called a "morphylitic diamond"

--whatever that may mean--and said only two of them had ever been found

--the Emperor of China had the other one.

Afterward, in London, it was a pleasure to me to see this fantastic

vagabond come marching into the lobby of the hotel in his grand-ducal

way, for he always had some new imaginary grandeur to develop--there was

nothing stale about him but his clothes. If he addressed me when

strangers were about, he always raised his voice a little and called me

"Sir Richard," or "General," or "Your Lordship"--and when people began to

stare and look deferential, he would fall to inquiring in a casual way

why I disappointed the Duke of Argyll the night before; and then remind

me of our engagement at the Duke of Westminster's for the following day.

I think that for the time being these things were realities to him. He

once came and invited me to go with him and spend the evening with the

Earl of Warwick at his town house. I said I had received no formal

invitation. He said that that was of no consequence, the Earl had no

formalities for him or his friends. I asked if I could go just as I was.

He said no, that would hardly do; evening dress was requisite at night in

any gentleman's house. He said he would wait while I dressed, and then

we would go to his apartments and I could take a bottle of champagne and

a cigar while he dressed. I was very willing to see how this enterprise

would turn out, so I dressed, and we started to his lodgings. He said if

I didn't mind we would walk. So we tramped some four miles through the

mud and fog, and finally found his "apartments"; they consisted of a

single room over a barber's shop in a back street. Two chairs, a small

table, an ancient valise, a wash-basin and pitcher (both on the floor

in a corner), an unmade bed, a fragment of a looking-glass, and a

flower-pot, with a perishing little rose geranium in it, which he called

a century plant, and said it had not bloomed now for upward of two

centuries--given to him by the late Lord Palmerston (been offered a

prodigious sum for it)--these were the contents of the room. Also a

brass candlestick and a part of a candle. Rogers lit the candle, and

told me to sit down and make myself at home. He said he hoped I was

thirsty, because he would surprise my palate with an article of champagne

that seldom got into a commoner's system; or would I prefer sherry, or

port? Said he had port in bottles that were swathed in stratified

cobwebs, every stratum representing a generation. And as for his

cigars--well, I should judge of them myself. Then he put his head out

at the door and called:

"Sackville!" No answer.

"Hi-Sackville!" No answer.

"Now what the devil can have become of that butler? I never allow a

servant to--Oh, confound that idiot, he's got the keys. Can't get into

the other rooms without the keys."

(I was just wondering at his intrepidity in still keeping up the delusion

of the champagne, and trying to imagine how he was going to get out of

the difficulty.)

Now he stopped calling Sackville and began to call "Anglesy." But

Anglesy didn't come. He said, "This is the second time that that equerry

has been absent without leave. To-morrow I'll discharge him." Now he

began to whoop for "Thomas," but Thomas didn't answer. Then for

"Theodore," but no Theodore replied.

"Well, I give it up," said Rogers. "The servants never expect me at this

hour, and so they're all off on a lark. Might get along without the

equerry and the page, but can't have any wine or cigars without the

butler, and can't dress without my valet."

I offered to help him dress, but he would not hear of it; and besides, he

said he would not feel comfortable unless dressed by a practised hand.

However, he finally concluded that he was such old friends with the Earl

that it would not make any difference how he was dressed. So we took a

cab, he gave the driver some directions, and we started. By and by we

stopped before a large house and got out. I never had seen this man with

a collar on. He now stepped under a lamp and got a venerable paper

collar out of his coat pocket, along with a hoary cravat, and put them

on. He ascended the stoop, and entered. Presently he reappeared,

descended rapidly, and said:

"Come--quick!"

We hurried away, and turned the corner.

"Now we're safe," he said, and took off his collar and cravat and

returned them to his pocket.

"Made a mighty narrow escape," said he.

"How?" said I.

"B' George, the Countess was there!"

"Well, what of that?--don't she know you?"

"Know me? Absolutely worships me. I just did happen to catch a glimpse

of her before she saw me--and out I shot. Haven't seen her for two

months--to rush in on her without any warning might have been fatal.

She could not have stood it. I didn't know she was in town--thought she

was at the castle. Let me lean on you--just a moment--there; now I am

better--thank you; thank you ever so much. Lord bless me, what an

escape!"

So I never got to call on the Earl, after all. But I marked the house

for future reference. It proved to be an ordinary family hotel, with

about a thousand plebeians roosting in it.

In most things Rogers was by no means a fool. In some things it was

plain enough that he was a fool, but he certainly did not know it.

He was in the "deadest" earnest in these matters. He died at sea, last

summer, as the "Earl of Ramsgate."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT

by Mark Twain

[Left out of A Tramp Abroad, because it was feared that some of the

particulars had been exaggerated, and that others were not true. Before

these suspicions had been proven groundless, the book had gone to press.

--M. T.]

The following curious history was related to me by a chance railway

acquaintance. He was a gentleman more than seventy years of age, and his

thoroughly good and gentle face and earnest and sincere manner imprinted

the unmistakable stamp of truth upon every statement which fell from his

lips. He said:

You know in what reverence the royal white elephant of Siam is held by

the people of that country. You know it is sacred to kings, only kings

may possess it, and that it is, indeed, in a measure even superior to

kings, since it receives not merely honor but worship. Very well; five

years ago, when the troubles concerning the frontier line arose between

Great Britain and Siam, it was presently manifest that Siam had been in

the wrong. Therefore every reparation was quickly made, and the British

representative stated that he was satisfied and the past should be

forgotten. This greatly relieved the King of Siam, and partly as a token

of gratitude, partly also, perhaps, to wipe out any little remaining

vestige of unpleasantness which England might feel toward him, he wished

to send the Queen a present--the sole sure way of propitiating an enemy,

according to Oriental ideas. This present ought not only to be a royal

one, but transcendently royal. Wherefore, what offering could be so meet

as that of a white elephant? My position in the Indian civil service was

such that I was deemed peculiarly worthy of the honor of conveying the

present to her Majesty. A ship was fitted out for me and my servants and

the officers and attendants of the elephant, and in due time I arrived in

New York harbor and placed my royal charge in admirable quarters in

Jersey City. It was necessary to remain awhile in order to recruit the

animal's health before resuming the voyage.

All went well during a fortnight--then my calamities began. The white

elephant was stolen! I was called up at dead of night and informed of

this fearful misfortune. For some moments I was beside myself with

terror and anxiety; I was helpless. Then I grew calmer and collected my

faculties. I soon saw my course--for, indeed, there was but the one

course for an intelligent man to pursue. Late as it was, I flew to New

York and got a policeman to conduct me to the headquarters of the

detective force. Fortunately I arrived in time, though the chief of the

force, the celebrated Inspector Blunt was just on the point of leaving

for his home. He was a man of middle size and compact frame, and when he

was thinking deeply he had a way of kniting his brows and tapping his

forehead reflectively with his finger, which impressed you at once with

the conviction that you stood in the presence of a person of no common

order. The very sight of him gave me confidence and made me hopeful.

I stated my errand. It did not flurry him in the least; it had no more

visible effect upon his iron self-possession than if I had told him

somebody had stolen my dog. He motioned me to a seat, and said, calmly:

"Allow me to think a moment, please."

So saying, he sat down at his office table and leaned his head upon his

hand. Several clerks were at work at the other end of the room; the

scratching of their pens was all the sound I heard during the next six or

seven minutes. Meantime the inspector sat there, buried in thought.

Finally he raised his head, and there was that in the firm lines of his

face which showed me that his brain had done its work and his plan was

made. Said he--and his voice was low and impressive:

"This is no ordinary case. Every step must be warily taken; each step

must be made sure before the next is ventured. And secrecy must be

observed--secrecy profound and absolute. Speak to no one about the

matter, not even the reporters. I will take care of them; I will see

that they get only what it may suit my ends to let them know." He

touched a bell; a youth appeared. "Alaric, tell the reporters to remain

for the present." The boy retired. "Now let us proceed to business--and

systematically. Nothing can be accomplished in this trade of mine

without strict and minute method."

He took a pen and some paper. "Now--name of the elephant?"

"Hassan Ben Ali Ben Selim Abdallah Mohammed Moist Alhammal

Jamsetjejeebhoy Dhuleep Sultan Ebu Bhudpoor."

"Very well. Given name?"

"Jumbo."

"Very well. Place of birth?"

"The capital city of Siam."

"Parents living?"

"No--dead."

"Had they any other issue besides this one?"

"None. He was an only child."

"Very well. These matters are sufficient under that head. Now please

describe the elephant, and leave out no particular, however

insignificant--that is, insignificant from your point of view. To me in

my profession there are no insignificant particulars; they do not exist."

I described he wrote. When I was done, he said:

"Now listen. If I have made any mistakes, correct me."

He read as follows:

"Height, 19 feet; length from apex of forehead insertion of tail, 26

feet; length of trunk, 16 feet; length of tail, 6 feet; total length,

including trunk, and tail, 48 feet; length of tusks, 9 feet; ears

keeping with these dimensions; footprint resembles the mark left when one

up-ends a barrel in the snow; the color of the elephant, a dull white;

has a hole the size of a plate in each ear for the insertion of jewelry

and possesses the habit in a remarkable degree of squirting water upon

spectators and of maltreating with his trunk not only such persons as he

is acquainted with, but even entire strangers; limps slightly with his

right hind leg, and has a small scar in his left armpit caused by a

former boil; had on, when stolen, a castle containing seats for fifteen

persons, and a gold-cloth saddle-blanket the size of an ordinary carpet."

There were no mistakes. The inspector touched the bell, handed the

description to Alaric, and said:

"Have fifty thousand copies of this printed at once and mailed to every

detective office and pawnbroker's shop on the continent." Alaric

retired. "There--so far, so good. Next, I must have a photograph of the

property."

I gave him one. He examined it critically, and said: