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(.VTH TP- BAMBLIJSTG- :^OTES or AN IDLE EXCURSIOi^ Br MAEK TWAIlSr, ^WTHOR OF '• AnVBNTURES OF TOM 8..WTBR," "OLD TIMBS OS TM HI88» SIPPI," " INNOCENTS ABBOAD." MO. ra«. MISSIS- tSmtttAtii ROSE-BELFORD PUBLISHING COMPANY. MDCCCLXXVIII, HUNTEB, BOSK & CO., PUOrTBRa AND BIKDUM rORONTO. AN IDLE EXCURSION. • ♦• CHAPTER I. I i f, LL 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 recre- ation, the bread-and-butter element left out. The Re\ er- end 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 state-room 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 whole 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, 6 AN IDLE EXCURSION. and this is what we've done. You see, everybody v^as a • movin' from the old buryin'-ground, and our folks wis most about left to theirselves, as you may say. They were crowded, too, as you know ; lot wa'n't big enough in the first place; and last year, when Seth's wife died, wo 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 unwill- ing, 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-grown that is \ but you reckon in children and other shorts, and strike an average, and I should say you might lay in thirty, or may be 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 wa.*^ 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 o' 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, v/hat's a dollar, any way ? 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 no- thin*, and cal'latin to take it out o' somebody in the course o' trade. Then there was another reason. John. No. 9's ? n AN IDLE EXCURSION. 7 ?' I i V a long way t!ie handiest lot in the sirtiitery, and the like- liest for situation. It lies right on top of a knoll in the dead centre of the buryin' -ground ; and you can see Mill- port from there, and Tracy's, and Hopper Mount, and a raft o' farms, and so on. There a'int no better outlook from a buryin'-plot in the State. Si Higgins says so, and I reckon he ought to know. Weil, and that ain't all. Course Shorb had to take No. 8 ; wa'n't no help for't. Now, No. 8 joins on to No. 9, but it's on the slope of the hill, and every time it rains it'll soak right down on to the Shorbs. Si Higgins says't when the deacon's time comes, he'd 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 ihe old grave-yard and stowed them one alongside o' t'other, on a first-come-first-served plan, no partialities, with gTan'ther Jones for a starter on'y because it hap- pened so, and windin' up indiscriminate with Seth's twins. A little crowded towards the end of the lay-out, may be, but we reckoned't wa'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 his'n ; C, Calvan and tribe. What's left is these two lots liere, — 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 ? ' AN IDLE EXCURSION. * I swan you've took me mighty unexpected, William ! It sort of started the shivers. Fact is, I was thinkin* ao busy about makin* things comfortable for the others, I hadn't thought about being buried myself.' ' Life's on'y a fleeting show, John, as the sajdn' is. We've all got to go, sooner or later. To go with a cloun record 's the main thing. Fact is, it's the on'y way worth strivin' for, John.' * Yes, that's so, William, that's so ; there ain't no gettin' round it. Which of these lots would you recommend V ' Well, it depends, John. Are you particular about out- look ? • ' I don't say I am, William ; I don't say I ain't. Reely, I don't know. But mainly, I reckon, I'd set store by a south exposure.' * That's easy fixed, John ; they're both south exposure. They take the sun and the Shorbs get the shade.* * How about sile, William ? ' * D's a sandy sile, E's mostly loom.' * You may jimme E, then, William; a sandy silo caves in more or less, and costs for repairs.* * AU right ; set your name down here, John, under E. Now, if you don't mind payin' me your share]of the four- teen dollars, John, while we're on the business, every- thing's fixed.' After some higgling and sharp bargaining the money was paid, and John bade his brother good-night and took his leave. There was a 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 ! I AN IDLE EXCURSION. 9 f i It's D that mostly loom, not E ; and John's booked for a sandy sile after all.' There was another soft chuckle, and William depaHcd 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. To- ward the middle of the afternoon we arrived on board the staunch steamship * Bermuda,' with bag and baggage, and hunted for a shady place. It was blazing summer weather until we were half way down the harbour. Then I but- toned my coat closely ; half-an-hour later I put on a spring overcoat, and buttons 1 that. As we passed the light- ship I added an ulster, and tied a handkerchief round the collar to hold it snug up to my neck. So rapidly had the sumnK ■ gone and the winter come again ! By iii'7^ *^fall we were far out at sea, with no land in sight. telegrams could come here, no letters, no news. It 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-coloured soundings into fathom- less deep blue ; no ships visible anywhere over the wide ocean ; no company but Mother Gary's chickens, wheeling, darling, skimming the waves in the sun. There were some sea-faring men among the passengers, and the con- versation drifted into matters concerning ships and sailors. One said that ' true as a needle to the pole ' was a bad figure, fcince the needle seldom pointed to the pole. He said a ship's compass was not faithful to any particular point, but was the moat fickle and treacherous of the «er- 10 AN IDLE EXCmSION. vants of man. Tt was forever changing. It changed ovevy (lay in the year; consequently the amount of the daily variation had to bo ciphered out and allowance madc^ for it, cIhc 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 com- pass, 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 now iron vessel thousands of miles from her birth-place, aud 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 ot college students. Queer lot. Ignorant ? Why, they didn't know the cat- heads 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 on board with gold spectacles on. And besides, he was rigged out from maintruck to keelson in the nobbiest clothes that ever saw a fo'castle. He had a chest full, too ; cloaks and broadcloth coats and velvet vests j everything swell, you know ; and didn't the salt water fix them out for him ? I guess not ! Well, going to sea, the mate told him to go aloft and help to shake out the fore-to'-gallants'l. Up he shins to the fore-top, with his spectacles on, and in a minute AN IDLE EXCURSION'. 11 1 ; down ho comes again, looking insulted. Says the mate, " What (lid you come down for ? " Says the chap, " P'raps 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 ijo 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 about 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 dining-room 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 seen a governor before. I looked and looked at that face, and then all of a sudden it popped on me. But I didn't give any sign. Says I, «' Mate, I've a notion to go over and shake hands with him." Says he, " I think I see you doing it, Tom." Says I, " Mate, I'm a-going to do it." Says he, " Oh, yes, I guess so ! May be you don't want to bet you will, T <'ii ? " Says I, " I don't mind going a V on it mate." Says he, " Put it up." " Up she goes," says I, planking the cash. This surprised him. But he covered it, and says pretty sarcastic, " Hadn't you better take your grub with the governor and the ladies, Tom ? " Says I. " Upon second 12 AN IDLE EXCURSION. 1 thoughts, I will." Says he, " Well, Tom, you are a dum fool." Says I, " May be I am, may be I ain't ; but the daain question is, Do you want to risk two and a half that I won't do it ? " " Make it a V," says he. " Done," says I. [ started him a-giggling and slapping his hand on his thigh, he felt so good. I w«?nt over there and leaned my knuckles on the table a minutg and looked the govemoi in the face, and says I, " Mister 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'v 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 towards 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 with- out 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 a while, and then got up and walked aft without making any re- ply. 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 ma- ith- 1 AN IDLE EXCURSION. 13 chinery to running smoothly again after this derange- ment ; but at length a conversation sprang up about that important and jealously guarded instrument, a ship's time-keeper, its exceeding delicate accuracy, and the Avreck 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 Rever- end, got oflT on a yam, with a fair wind and everything drawing. It was a true story, too, — about Captain Kounceville's shipwreck, — true m 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. Cap- tain 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 pro- visions nor water. They had scarcely any clothing ; no one had a coat but the captain. The coat was changing hands all the time, for the weather was very cold. When- ever a man became exhausted with the cold, they put the coat on him and laid him down between two ship-mates until the gaiment 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 caress- ing pats on the shoulder. One day, when hunger and thirst weie making their sure inroads upon the men's u AN IDLE EXCURSION. strength and spirits, a floating barrel was seen at a dis- tance. It seemed a great find, for doubtless it contained food of some sort. A biave fellow swam to it, and ,9,fter 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 daj 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 ast success was achieved, but the signal brought no help. The ship faded out of sight and left despair behind her. By and by an- other ship appeared, and passed so near that the cast- aways, 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 glid- ing relentlessly from them ; they would not be alive when the next sun rose. For a day or two past the men had 1 ] } 1 AN IDLE EXCURSION. 15 \ I, lost their voices, but now Captain Rounceville whis- pered, * 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. ray less 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 I Here was a 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 row- locks. Nearer it came, and nearer, — within thirty steps, but nothing visible. Then a deep voice: ' H.o\-lo !' The castaways could not answer; their swollen tongues re- fused voice. The boat skirted round and round the raft, started away — the agony of it! — returned, rested on the oars, close at hand, listening, no doubt. The deep voice again : ' Hol-Zo ! Where aro yo, shipmates ? * Captain Rounceville whispered to his men, saying : ' Whisper yjour best, boys ! now — all at once ! So they sent out an eight-fold 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 of the saving ship. Said the Reverend, concluding : — * T] ore 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 16 AN IDLE EXCURSION. (loom 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-hook. 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 needle-like oar and di- minished 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 preg- nant instant had had their work appointed for them in the dawn of time and could not fail of the performance ! * Th3re was a deep, thoughtful silence for some moments. Then the grave, pale young man said, — • What is the chronometer of God V i \ : \ i ■^'- events len the of that . The glance red for md di- bright ito the t preg- lem in unce ! ' ments. t AN IDLE fiXCUJttilON. 17 i^ CHAPTER II. T 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 journey- ing ship-masters, a Boston merchant, and a returning Bermudian who had been absent from his Bermuda thir- teen years ; these sat on the starboard side. On the port side sat the Reverend in the seat of honour ; the pale young man next to him ; I next ; next t6 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, bu< small companies are pleasantest. No racks upon the table ; the sky cloudless, the sun brilliant, the blue sea scarcely ruffled : then what had be- «ome of the four married couples, the three oachelors, and the active and obliging doctor from the niral districts of Pennsylvania ? — for all these were on deck when we sailed down New York harbour. 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 Penn- sylvania, are evidently travelling together. All but tha doctor grouped in camp-chairs on deck. 18 AN IDLE EXCURSION. i Passing principal fort. The doctor is one of those peo- ple who has an infallible preventive of sea-sickness ; 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 stiuck their colours, notwithstanding the " infallible." They have gone below. The other two begin to show distress. 5 P.M. Exit one husband and one bachelor. Thcce still had their infallible in cargo when they started, but arrived at the companion-way without it. 5.10. LadT No. 3, two bachelors, and one married man have gone below with I5heir own opinion of the infallible 5.20. Passing Quarantine Hulk. The infallible harj done the business for all the party except the Scotchman'^* wife and the author of that formidable remedy. Nearing the Light-Ship, j^xit the Scotchman's wife, head dropped on stewardess's shoulder. Entering the open sea. Exit doctor 1 i The rout seems permanent ; hence the smallness of tlic company at table since the voj^age began. Our v^aptain is a grave, handsome Hercules of thirty-five, with a brown hand of such majestic size that one cannot eat for admir- ing 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 woman to ask trivial, irrelevant, and pursuing ques- f f 1 ^i/^ 1 AN IDLE EXCUBSION. 19 se peo- ess ; is saying, Dlutely Takes olours, below. ThcGG ed, but edman iallible )le haa hman'&i 's wife, of the aptain brown admir- •urnish tuples. , from nature ques- 'i i lions,-' \kVVNl\ims that pursue you from a beginning in nothii\*; lo a run-to-cover in nowhere." Reply of Ber- inudiaii of tAv^isnty-seven years' absence : " Yes ; and to think they have logical, analytical minds and argumenta- tive ability. If ou see 'em begin to whet up whenever they smell argument in the air." Plainly these be philo- sophers. Twice since "v;e left port our engines havo stopped for t couple of minutes at a time. Now they stop again. Say? the pale young man, meditatively, " There ! — that engi- neer is sitting down to rest again," Grave stare fiom the captain, whose mighty jaws cease to work, and whose harpooned potato stops in mid-air on its way to his open paralyzed mouth. Presently says he 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 conversa- tion, 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 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 biv trunk, which I had AN IDLE EXCURSION. placed there by mistake, thinking it to be a flauk of some thing. So a party of us conquered the tedium of the even ing with a fbw games and were ready for bod about six bells, mariner's time, the signal for putting out the lights There was much chat in the smoking-cabin on the uppei deck after luncheon to-day, mostly vhaler yams fron; those old sea-captains. Captain Tom Bowling was garru- lous. He had that garrulous attention to minor detail which is bom 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 th^ 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 tc ribbons, first one stick going, then another, boom ! smash '> crash ! duck your head and stand from under ! when up comes Johnny Kogers, capstan bar in hand, eyes a-blazing, hair a-flying . . . no 't wasn't •Johnnj'^ Rogers . . . let me see . . . seerns to me Johnny Rogers wa'n't along that voyage ; he was along one voyage, I know thati 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 Englc^nd degrees of merit in ship-building. Said he, " You get a vessel built away down Maine- way ; Bath, for instance ; whai « (.ne result i First thing you AN IDLE EXCURSION. 21 )me ven b six ^hts ppei froix irru ietai) long oject liting r, the ,d-on •eath m. to aashi jn up ^zing, ■ • a'n't that« Igned Icome lown rgor icism ing. you i do, you want to heave her down for repairs, — thafs the result ! Well, sir, she hain't been down a week till you can heave a dog through her seams. You send that ves- sel to sea, and what's the result ? She wets her oakum the first trip ! Leave it to any man if 't ain't so. Well, you let owr 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, recognised the descrip- tive 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 conver- sation 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 thunder bolt in the home skies moving the friends by snug firesides to compassion for that poor mariner, and prayers for his succour. 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. B 22 AN IDLE EXCUllSION. Pity for tho mariner's wife ! all right again, but not in the way the poetry puts it. Look-a-liere ! whose life's the saf cfe Jie whole world ? The poor mariners. You look at the statistics, you'll see. So don't you fool away any sympathy on the poor mariner's dangers and priva- tions and sufferings. Leave that to the poetry muffs. Now you look at the other side a minute. Here is Cap- tain Brace, forty years old, been at sea thirty. On his way now to take command of his ship and sail south from Bermuda. Next week he'll be under way : easy times, comfortable quarters ; passengers, sociable company ; just enough to do to keep his mind healthy and not tire him ; king over his ship, boss of everything and everybody ; thirty years' safety to learn him that his profession ain't a dangerous one. Now you look back at his home. His wife's a feeble woman ; she's a stranger in New York ; shut up in blazing hot or freezing cold lodgings, according to the season ; don't know anybody hardly ; no company but her lonesomeness and her thoughts ; husband gone six months at a time. She has borne eight children ; five of them she has buried without her husband ever setting eyes on them. She watched them all the long nights till they died, — he comfortable on the sea ; she followed them to the grave, she heard the clods fall that broke her heart, — ^he comfortable on the sea ; she mourned at home, weeks and weeks, missing them every day and every hour, — he cheerful at sea knowing nothing about it. Now look at it a minute, — turn it over in vour 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 i AN IDLE EXCURSION. 23 ^ rot ; give it to his wife's hftrd lines, where it belonn^s I Poetry makes out that all the wife worries about is the danger 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 mo 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 evei" since then had ceased to roam. And what do you suppose was this simple-hearted, life-long wanderer's idea of settling down and ceasing to roam ? Why, the making of two five- month voyages a year between Surinam and Boston foi sugar and molasses. Among other talk, to-day, it came out that whale-ships carry no elector. 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 num- 24 A.N IDLE EXCURSION, bored instead of named. A book of directions goes with this. It dcHcribes diaeaacs 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 sui*priso 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 tlu book : it said, give him a tea- spoonful 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 tea- spoonful of No, 7, and I'll be hanged if it didn't kill him in fifteen minutes ! There's something bout this medi- cine-chest system that's too many for me ! " There was a good deal of pleasant gossip about old Captain " Humcane '' 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 bom 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 its A. B. C, and that blurred and distorted by the unfocused lenses of an untrained mind. \ a AN IDLE EXCURSION. 2A Such a man is only a gray and boarded child. This it* what old Hurricane Jones was, — simply an innocent, lov- able old infant. When his spirit was ii: repose he was a? sweet and gentle as a girl ; when his wrath was up he wa? a hurricane that made his nickname seem tamely desc. ip- tive. He was formidable in a fight, for ho was of powerful build and dauntless courage. Ho was frescoed from head to heel with pictures and mottoes tatooed 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 fish- woman. 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 lIx 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. fc /^ 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. Ho took a great liking to this 26 AN IDLE EXCURSION. Kev. 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, j'ou tackle it in dead earnest once, and you '11 find it '11 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 'em 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'U do it willi t i • >> t AN IDLE EXCURSION. 27 I 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* and the prophets of Baal. There was some mighty sharp men amongst 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'nt any mira- cle, 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 com- munity, 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 't wa'nt any use; he couldn't run any opposition to amount to any- thing. 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, — no thing very definite, may be, 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 * This ia the captain's own mistake. 28 AN IDLE EXCURSION. pray down fire from heaven on an altar ? It ain't much, may be, 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 that he had 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 indif- ferent ; told the other team to take the first innings. So they went at it, the whole four hundred and fifty, pray- ing 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 may be 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. ■« I AN IDLE EXCURSION. 29 I ; \ " What does Isaac do, now ? He steps up nnd says to some friends of his, there, ' Pour four barrels of water on the altar !' Everybody was astonished ; for the other side 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 bar- rels, 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 programme, 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 I" " 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 80 AN IDLE EXCURSION. 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 eye-sight. 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-coloured 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 spectres in plug hats and silken flounces that file up the companion-way in melancholy procession and step upon the deck ? These are they which took the infallible preventive of sea-sickness in New York harbour 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 ghttering belts of blue and green where moderate soundings were, and its broad splotches of rich brown where the rocita i ^ «k AN IDLE EXCUKSION. 31 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 vessvl's body, and now before us loomed Hamilton on her clus- tered hill-sides and summits, the whitest mass of terraced architecture that exists in the world perhaps. It was Sunday afternoon, and on th'> pier were gathered one or two hundred Bermudians, haif of them black, half of them white, and aU 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 gentle- man, 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, scan- ned the napless, threadbare costume of venerable fashion that had done Sunday-service no man knows how many years, contemplated the marvellous stove-pipe hat of still more ancient and venerable pattern, with its poor pathe- tic 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 , , . thcra's something 32 AN IDLE EXCUBSION. 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 Aaa, with sympathetic intore»^ » been • • 9 V, but to me , "with AN IDLE EXCURSION. 33 ( CHAPTER III the Reverend and I had at last arrived at Hamil- ton, 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 uopn 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, in- herited 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 u AN IDLE EXCURSION. frequent and eloquent fi^ro. In Bermudian 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 sor upon the stage of life to dare and do for himself, climaxe? all counsel, supplicflition, admonition, comprehends all am- bition, when he says, ' Be an onion ! ' When parallel with the pier, and ten or fifteen steps out side 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 werf well and neatly dressed, many of them nattily, a few ol them very stylishly. One would have to travel far before he would find another town of twelve thousand inhabi- tants that could represent itself so respectably, in the mat ter of clothes, on a freight-pier, without premeditation ox effort. The women and young girLs, black and white, w ho 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 sombre colours. Around one isolated potato barrel stood foui yuuiig ^en tlemen, 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. Anothei young gentleman came up, looked longingly at the bar- rel bat saw no rest for his foot there. He wandered hen and there, but without result. Nobody sat upon a barrel AN IDLE EXCURSION. 35 as is the custom of the idle in other lands, yet all the iso- lated 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 deter- mined 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 onioiia ? ' or, * how is onions ? ' Naturally enough this was their first interest ; but they dropped into the war the moment it was satisfied. W^e went ashore and found a novelty of a pleasing na- ture; 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 point- edly advised me to make the most of it, then. We knew of a boarding-house, and what we needed now was some- body to pilot us to it. Presently a little barefooted col- oured boy came along, whose raggedness was conspicu- ously un-Bermudian. His rear was so marvellously be- patcbed with coloured 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 light- ning-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 us nothing for his map, and but a trifle for his t»ervices ; so the Reverend doubled it. The little chap re- 86 AN IDLE EXCURSION. ceived the money with a beaming applause in hia eye which plainly said, ' This man's an onion ! ' We had brought no letters of introduction Our names had been misspelt 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, over- looking a bloomy display of flowers and flowering shrubs — calla and annunciation lilies, iantanas, heliotrope, jessa- mine, roses, pinks, double geraniums, oleanders, pomegra- nates, 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 c»ral 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 hill-sides, with perpendicular walls unmarred by crack or crevice, and perhaps you fancy that a house grew out of the ground there, and has been re- moved in a single piece from the mould. 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 chu^ ning. Thus soft is this stone. B^l AN IDLE EXCURSION. 37 Then with a common handsaw they saw the greac 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 build- ing 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 shal- low 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 — built in massive panels, with broad cap-stones 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, end 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 blind- ingest. 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 unempha- sized and scarcely perceptible polish. The white of mar- ble 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 38 kH IDLE £XCU11SI0N. looks as if it had been carved from a single block of stone, and the doors and windows sawed out afterwards. 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 dwell- ings are— it will so fascinate you that you will keep your eyes upon 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 chim- neys 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 ''ountry road, it will wring an exclamation from him, fure.^^ WhercYer you go, in town or country, you find those snowy houses, and always with masses of bright-coloured flowers about them, hut 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 coun- try-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. i>fo where is there dirt or stench, puddle, or hog- wallow, ueglect, disorder, or lack of trim- • I Tii thi th in del W( to AN IDLE EXCUB3I0N. 39 t I I ness and ncatnoss. The roads, the .streets, the dwellings, the people, the clothes, this neatness extends to every- thing 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 dothe poor live ? No answer was arrived at. Therefore, we agi'eed to leave this conundrum for future statesmen to wrangle over. What a bright and startling spectacle one of those blaz- ing white country palaces, with its brown-tinted window caps and ledges, and green shutters, and its wealth ot 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 ! Bermuda roads are made by cutting down a few inches into the solid white coral — or a good many feet, where a Iiill 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 clean- ness 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 road -side. Finally he explained. Said he, " Well, I chew, you know, and the road's so plaguy clean." We walked several miles that afternoon in the bewil- ;dering glare of the sun, the white roads, and the white i buildings. Our eyes got to paining us a good deal. By- land-by a sooohing, blessed twilight sp/ead its cool balm 40 AN IDLE EXCURSION. around. We looked up in pleased surprise, and saw thai 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 coloured women whom we met usually bowed and spoke ; so did the children. The coloured men commonly gave the military salute. They borrowed this fashion from the soldiers, no doubt ; England has kept a garrison here for generations. The younger men's custom of carry- ing small canes is also borrowed from the soldiers, I sup- pose, 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 delightful lest 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 sombre twilight and stillness of the woods ; flittering visions of white fortresses and beacon tow rs pictured against the sky on remote hill-tops ; 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 colour, 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 ■ •I '■. IN IDLE EXCURSION. 41 1 sunny and still pleasant; it carries you by the prettiest and peacefullest and most home-like 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 ; con- sequently, 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 va- riety. 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 hill-top, 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 sen 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 arc tired of it — if you are so constituted as to be able to get tiied of it. You may march the country roads in maidon modita- 42 AN IDLE EXCURSION. tion fancy free, by field and farm, for no dog will plunge out at you from unsuspected gate, with breath-taking sur- prise and ferocious bark, notwithstanding it is a Christian land and a civilized. We saw upwards 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 offence when properly distributed, but when piled they obstructed travel As we entered the edge of the town that Sunday after- noon, 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 ques- tioned 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, bj" 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 neighbour on one side, and there's another family that's our next neighbours on the other side ; but there's a general coolness all round 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." > «. AN IDLE EXCURSION. 43 plunge ing sur- tiristian on cats in the led the 3d by a 'he cats jn piled y after- water. ), asked and we le door, swer — md we i ques- leasant I small ords to isently 3thing, she is family there's speak. r, have eavers f " 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 the back yard. Both of these neighbours 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 in- tending 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 tom-cat 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. Yel- verton — 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, caiTying the remains vnth 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 nighi he tried that trap on his neck, and it fitted him so, and was so sort of satisfactory, that he laid down a.^d 44 AN IDLE EXCURSION. 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 coloured Deacon Jackson's cat. I only remember the last end of its name, which was To-be-or- not-to-be-that-is-the-question-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 con- sidered 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 neighbours went to court; everybody took sides. It got hotter and hotter, and broke up all the friendships for three hundred j'^ards 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 v.^arn't worth a cancelled postage-stamp, any way, taking the average of cats here; but I lost the case. V/hat could I expect? The system is all wrong here, and is bound to make re- volution and bloodshed some day. You see, they give the magistrate a poor little starvation salary, and then I AN IDLE EXCURSION. 45 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 currrency ? " " Yes — onions. And they were forty per cent, discoimt, 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 neighbours don't speak to each other now. Mrs. Brown had named a child after me. So she changed its name right away. She is a Baptist. Well, in the course of bap- tising it over again, it got drowned. I was hoping we might get to be friendly again some time or other, Int of course this drowning the child knocked that all out of the question. It would have saved a world of heart-break and ill blood if she had named it dry." I knew by the sight 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 friend were busy in an instant trying to imagine whose death, among the i^'^and dignitaries, could command such a mark of respect as this. Then a 46 AN IDLE EXCURSION. shudder shook him and me at the same moment, and I knew that we had jumped to one and the same conclu- sion : " 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. . mith ? " " Why certainly they would, if he was dead.** That seemed to " size " the country a^in. ndl iclu- the said rder L^ IDLE EXCURSION. 4y ; rder, CHAPTER IV. J HE 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, drop- ping a note here and there, where a tooth is gone. We attended evening service at the stately Episcopal church on the hill, where were five or six hundred people, half of them w!:ite 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 confi- dently 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 argu- ment 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." 4f) AN IDLE EXCURSION. There are those who believe that the most difficult thing to create is a woman who can comprehend that it is wrong to smuggle ; and that a i 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 by 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 sombre outlines. We strode farther and farther down this tunnel, cheering the way w^ith chat. Presently the chat took this shape : — " How insensibly the character of a people and of a government makes its impression upon a stranger, and gives him a sense of se- curity or of insecurity without his taking deliberate thought upon the matter or asking anybody a question " We have been in this land halx a day ; v/e have seen none bnt honest faces ; we have noticed the British flag flying' which means efficient government and good order ; so without inquiry we plunged 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 fooi^^eps. 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 concribute witli thankful avidity to the new Methodist church, and are AN IDLE EXCUBSION. id I so I happy to think how lucky it was that those little coloured Sunday-school scholars did not seize upon everything we had with violence, before we recovered from our momen- tary helpless condition. By the light of cigars we write down the names of weightier philanthropists than our- selves 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 child- ren, 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 sea-side, 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 1 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 ask- ing. Many people have never had the headache or the toothache, and I am one of those myself; but everybody has worn tight shoes for two or three hours, and know the luxury of taking them off in a retired place and see- ing his feet swell up and obscure the firmament. Few of us will ever forget the exquisite hour we were married. Once when I was callow, bashful cub, I took a plain, un- sentimental 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 " 1 said, " Did I ? " Then I put my attention there tmd kept still. At the end of another half hour she said, " Why do you say * yes, oh, yes 1 ' and * Ha, ha, oh, certainly I very true I ' to every- t 50 AN IDLE EXCURSION. j i I thing T say, when half the time those are entirely irrele- vant 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 tim« ? " I explained that very funny comedies r^lways 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, bTxm- ing 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 theatre." 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. Ke said that in the Potomac hospitals rough pine coflins 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 AN IDLE EXCURSION. 51 the ren the do I in with a coffin on his shoulder, and stood trying to m.ike 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 mys- terious 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 labour, 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. I'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 laboured 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. Be took fl. rest ; he gathered all the rem- nant 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, 52 AN IDLE EXCURSION. the little white table-waiter appeared suddenly in my room and .shot a wingle word out of hiniself : " 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 anj^whcre ; 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 the table with his fly-binish, rigid, erect, his face set in a cast-iron gravity, he was a statue till he detected a dawn- ing want in somebody's eye ; then he pounced down, sup- plied 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 — V\ " Yes s'r 1" "Isitearly, oris— ?" " Eight-five !" " Do you have to do all the ' chores/ or is there some- body to give you a 1- " "Coloured girl!" " Is there only one parish in this island, or are there — " " Eight !" AN IDLE EXCURSION. r3 u* If " Is the big church on the hill a parish chiirc! "Chapel-of-oase!" "Is taxation here classified into poll, paiisli, town, and^" "Don't know!" Before T could cudgel another question out of my hea3 he was below, hand-springing across the back-yard. He had slid down the balusters, head first. I gave up trying to provoke a discuss! i 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 oppor- tunities. During this day and the next we took carriage drive, about the island and over to the town of St. George's fifteen or twenty miles away. Such hard, excellent road, to drive over are not to be found elsewhere out of Europe. An intelligent young coloured man drove us, and acted as guide-book. In the edge of the town we saw five or six 'mountain-cabbage palms (atrocious names !) standing in a straight row, and equidistant from each other. These were not the largest or the tallest trees I have ever seen, Ibut they were the stateliest, the most majestic. That row lof 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 54 AN IDLE EXCURSION. i 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 upwards for six feet or more, the cylin- der is a bright, fresh green, and is formed of wrappings like those of an efc,r 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 plumbline 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. ' Tho birds we came across in the country were singu- larly tame. Even that wild creature, the quail, would pick around in the grass at ease while we iijspected it and talked about it at leisure. A small bird of the can- ary species had to be stirred up with the butt-end of the whip before it would move, end 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, foi doubtless there is more or less brag about it. In San Fx{?LE EXCURSION. a tangle of stilts. In dryer places the noble tamarind sent down its gi-ateful cloud of shade. Here and there the blossomy tamarisk adorned the roadside. There was a curious gnarled and twisted black tree, without a single leaf on it. It might have passed itself off for a dead apple- tree, but for the fact that it had a star-like, red-hot flower sprinkled sparsely over its person. It had the scattery red glow that a constellation might have when glimpsed through smoked glass. It is possible that our constella- tions have been so constructed as to be invisible_thi:pugh smoked glass ; if this is so it is a great mistal We saw a tree that bears grapes, and just as caMTy 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 ma ly a time, and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a hair lip 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 blue-bells, — a fine and striking spectacle at a little distance. But the dull cedar is everywhere, and its is the prevailing foliage. One does not appreciate how dull it is until the varnished, AN IDLE EXCURSION. 67 ly a 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 coloured farmers digging their crops of potatoes and onions, their wives and children helping, entirely contented and comfortable, if looks go for any- thing. 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 mon- otony became very tiresome presently, and even some- thing worse. The spectacle of an entire nation grovelling in contentment is an infuriating thing. We felt the lack of something in this community, — a vague, an undefin- able, 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. II *i 58 A.N IDLE EXCURSION. H 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 coloured farmers buy ours for a song, and live on them. Havana might exchange cigars with Connecticut in the same advantageous way ii. 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 sprout- ing. Bermuda used to make a vast annual profit out of this staple before fire-arms 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 g(b 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 boy's mind a good substantial grip on the dimensions of the place. At the principal hotel in 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 prepa- ration had been made. Yet it was still an hour before dinner time. We argued ; she yielded not ; we suppli- cated, she was serene. The hotel had not been expecting J AN IDLE EXCURSION 5f an inicadation 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 h^>d much plea- sant 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 lo be only pepper of a parti- cularly 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 his 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 i\\e 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 b jttom, 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 i- 60 AN IDLE EXCUBSION. hard whitewash. Some of these are a quarter-acre in size. They catch and carry the rain-fall 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 equa- ble, 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 rai- ment, and yet there was a constant breeze ; consequently we were never discomfited by heat. At four or five in the afteriioon 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 night? 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 Ber- muda 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 ad- mirals 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 I it a \ AN IDLE EXCURSION. 61 J vaguely, that it was a jug, but was persistently thwarted in the twenty-two effoiis I made to visit it. However, it was no matter, for I found afterwards 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 har- assments ; 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 Ame- ricans go there about the first of March and remain until the early spring weeks have finished their villainies at home. The Bermudas 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 coun- try to go to for a vacation, for there are chaiming li^ttle 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 be- ing disappointed about getting a yacht for a sail ; and now our furlough was ended. 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 ■ I 62 AN IDLE EXCURSION. \ 1 health permits are not granted after seven in the evening, partly because a ship cannot be inspected and overhauled with exhaustive thoroughness except in the daylighij and partly because health officials are liable to catch coLl 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 humi- Hating captivity all night, under the very nose of the lit- tle official reptile who is supposed to protect New York from pestilence by his vigilant " inspections." This im- posing rigour 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 coimtries. 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 boot-black, who passed us a folded paper on a forked stick, and away we went. The entire " inspection " did not occupy thir- teen seconds. The health officer's place is worth a hundred thousand dollars a year to him. His system of inspection is per- fect, 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 a c hi I w bi th ' AN IDLE EXCIJKSION. ca addition of an amount of exasperation and bitterness of soul that the spectacle of that health ofR . . . . . . * could hardly sweeten. Now, why would it not be better and simpler to let the ships pass in unmo- lested, and the permits be exchanged once a year by post? * When the proofs of this article came to me I Haw that " The Atlantic " had condemned the words which occupied the place where is now a vacancy. I can invent no figure worthy to otand in the ahoesi of the lurid colossus which a too deep respect for the opinions of mankind hao thus ruthlessly banished from his due and rightful pedestd in the world's literature. I^et the blank remain a blank ; and let it suggest to the reader that he lias sustained a precious lost which can nev«r b« made good to him, M. T. 1 FACTS C )NCERNING THE RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CON • NECTICUT. WAS feeling blithe, almost jocuiMi. I put a match to my cigtar, and just then the morning's mail was hand- ed in. The first superscription I glanced at was in a handwriting that sent a thrill of pleasure through and through me. It was Aunt Mary's ; and she was the per- son I loved and honoured most in all the world, outside of my own household. She had been my boyhood's idol ; maturity, which is fatal to so many enchantments, had not been able to dislodge her from her pedestal ; no, it had only justified her right to be there, and placed her dethronement permanently among the impossibilities. To show how strong her influence over me was, I will observe that long after everybody else's " c^o-stop-smoking " had ceased to affect me in the slightest degree, Aunt Mary could still stir my torpid conscience into faint signs of life when she touched upon the matter. But all things have their limit, in this world. A happy day came at last, when even Aunt Mary's words could no longer move me. I was not merely glad to see that day arrive ; I was more than glad — I was grateful ; for when its sun had set, the one alloy that was able to mar my enjoyment of my aunt's society was gone. The remainder of her stay with us that winter was in every way a delight. Of course she pleaded with me just as earnestly as ever, after that blessed day, io quit RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME. 65 CON my pernicious habit, but to no purpose whatever ; the moment she opened the subject I at once bocame calmly, peacefully, contentedly indifferent — absolutely, adaman- tinely indifferent. Consequently the closing weeks of that memorable visit melted away as pleasantly as a dream, they were so freighted for me^ with tranquil satisfaction. I could not have enjoyed my pet vice more if my gentle tormenter had been a smoker herself, and an advocate of the practice. . Well, the sight of her handwriting reminded me that I was getting very hungry to see her again. I easily guessed what I should find in her letter. I opened it. Good! just as I expected ; she was coming ! Coming this very day, too, and by the morning train; I might expect her any moment. I said to myself, " I am thoroughly happy and content, now. If my most pitiless enemy could appear before me at this moment, I would freely right any wrong I may have done him." Straightway the door opened, and a shrivelled, shabby dwarf entered. He was not more than two feet high. He seemed to be about forty years old. Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape ; and so, while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say, " This is a conspicuous deformity," the spectator perceived that this little person was a deformity as a whole — a vague, general, evenly blended, nicely adjusted deformity. There was a fox-like cunning in the face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice. And yet, this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote and ill-defined resemblance to me ! It was dully perceptible in the mean form, the countenance, an-d even m 66 RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME. the clothes, gestures, manner, and attitudes of the creature. He was a far-fetched, dim suggestion of a burlesque upon me, a caricature of me in little. One thing about him struck me forcibly, and most unpleasantly : he was cover- ed all over with a fuzz}'-, greenish mould, such as one sometimes sees upon mildewed bread. The sight of it was nauseating, He stepped along with a chipper air, and flung himself into a doll's chair in a very fi-ee and easy way, without waiting to be asked. He tossed his hat into the waste basket. He picked up my old chalk pipe from the floor gave the stem a wipe or two on his knee, filled the bowl from the tobacco-box at his side, and said to me in a tone of pert command, — "Gimme a match ! " I blushed to the roots of my hair ; partly with indig- nation, but mainly because it somehow seemed to mo that this whole performance was very like an exaggeration of conduct which I myself had sometimes been guilty of in my intercourse with familiar friends — but never, nevev with strangers, I observed to myself. I wanted to kick the pygmy into the fire, but some incomprehensible sense of being legitimately under his authority legally and legitimately forced me to obey his order. He applied the match to the pipe, took a contemplated whiff" or two, and remarked in an irritating familiar way : — " Seems to me it 's devilish odd weather for this time of year." I flushed again, and in anger and humiliation as before ; for the language was hardly an exaggeration of some that I have uttered in my day, and moreover was delivered in a t< the RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME. 67 a tone of voice and with an exasperating drawl that had the seeming of a deliberate travesty of my style. Now there is nothing I am quite so sensitive about as a n:ock- ing ircitation of my drawling infirmity of speech. I spoke up sharply and said : — " Look hero, you miserable ash -cat ! you will have to give a little more attention to your manners, or I will throw you out of the window ! " The manikin smiled a smile of malicious content and security, puflfed a whifF of smoke contemptuously towards me, and said, with a still more elaborate drawl : — " Come — go gently, now ; don't put on too many airs with your betters." This cool snub rasped me all over, but it seemed to sub- jugate me, too, for a moment. The pygmy contemplated me awhile with weasel eyes, and then said, in a peculiarly sneering way : — " You turned a tramp away fr -m your door this mom- I said crustily : — " Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn't. How do yoit know ? '* " Well, I know. It is n't any matter how I know." " Very well. Suppose I did turn a tramp away from the door — what of it 'i " " O, nothing ; nothing in particular. Only you lied to him." ''I didn't! That is I—" " Yes, but you did ; you lied to him." I felt a guilty pang — in truth I had felt it forty times before that tramp had travelled a block from my door — 68 RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME. l\ but sffi I resolved to m ke a show of feeling slandered ; so I said : — " This is baseless impertinence. I said to the tramp — " " There — wait. You were about to lie again. / know what you said to him. You said the cook was gone down town and there was nothing left from breakfast. Tw© lies. You knew the cook was behind the door and plenty of provisions behind her" This astonishing accuracy silenced me ; and it filled me with wondering speculations, too, as to how this cub could have got his information. Of course he could have culled the information from the tramp, but by what sort of magic had he contrived to find out about the concealed cook ? Now the dwarf spoke again : — " It was rather pitiful, rather small, in you to refuse to read that poor young woman's manuscript the other day, and give your opinion as to its literary value ; and she bad come so far, too, and so hopefully. Now wcLsn't it ? " I felt like a cur ! And I had felt so every time the thing had recurred to my mind, I may as well confess. I flushed hotly and said : — " Look here, have you nothing better to do than prowl around prying into other people's business ? Did that girl tell you that ? " " Never mind whether she did or not. The main thing is, you did that contemptible thing. And you felt ashamed of it afterwards. Aha ! you feel ashamed of it now ! " This with a sort of devilish glee. With a fiery earnest- ness I responded : — *' I told that girl in the kindest gentlest way that I could hot consent to deliver judgment upon any one's wo RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME. 69 » » manuscript, because an individuars verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary efibrt, and therefore it. must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty- court's decision any way." " Yes, you said all that. So you did, you juggling, small-souled shuffler ! And yet when the happy hopeful- ness faded out of that poor girl's face, when you saw her furtively slip beneath her shawl the scroll she had so pa- tiently and honestly scribbled at, — so ashamed of her darling now, so proud of it before, — ^when you saw the gladness go out of her eyes and the tears come there, when she crept away so humbly who had come so — " " 0, peace ! peace ! peace ! Blister your merciless tongue, haven't all these thoughts tortured me enough, without your coming here to fetch them back again ? " Remoi*se ! remorse ! It seemed to me that it would eat the very heart out of me ! And yet that small fiend only sat there leering at me with joy and contempt, and placidly chuckling. Presently he began to speak again. Every sentence was an accusation, and every accusation a truth. Every clause was freighted with sarcasm and derision, every slow-dropping word burned like vitriol. The dwarf reminded me of times when I had flown at my children in anger and punished them for faults which a little inquiry would have taught me that others, and not they, had committed. He reminded me of how I had !