married couple of whom
Mrs. Carr had known something at home, and who had come to Madeira to
spend the honeymoon. Lady Florence also had been asked, but, rather to
Arthur's disappointment, she could not come.

When the long line of swinging hammocks, each with its two sturdy
bearers, were marshalled, and the adventurous voyagers had settled
themselves in them, they really formed quite an imposing procession,
headed as it was by the extra-sized one that carried Miss Terry, who
complained bitterly that "the thing wobbled and made her feel sick."

But to Arthur's mind there was something effeminate in allowing
himself, a strong, active man, to be carted up hills as steep as the
side of a house by two perspiring wretches; so, hot as it was, he, to
the intense amusement of his bearers, elected to get out and walk. The
newly-married man followed his example, and for a while they went on
together, till presently the latter gravitated towards his wife's
palanquin, and, overcome at so long a separation, squeezed her hand
between the curtains. Not wishing to intrude himself on their conjugal
felicity, Arthur in his turn gravitated to the side of Mrs. Carr, who
was being lightly swung along in the second palanquin some twenty
yards behind Miss Terry's. Shortly afterwards they observed a signal
of distress being flown by that lady, whose arm was to be seen
violently agitating her green veil from between the curtains of her
hammock, which immediately came to a dead stop.

"What is it?" cried Arthur and Mildred, in a breath, as they arrived
on the scene of the supposed disaster.

"My dear Mildred, will you be so kind as to tell that man" (pointing
to her front bearer, a stout, flabby individual) "that he must not go
on carrying me. I must have a cooler man. It makes me positively ill
to see him puffing and blowing and dripping under my nose like a fresh
basted joint."

Miss Terry's realistic description of her bearer's appearance, which
was, to say the least of it, limp and moist, was no exaggeration. But
then she herself, as Arthur well remembered, was no feather-weight,
especially when, as in the present case, she had to be carted up the
side of a nearly perpendicular hill some miles long, a fact very well
exemplified by the condition of the bearer.

"My dear Agatha," replied Mildred, laughing, "what is to be done? Of
course the man is hot, you are not a feather-weight; but what is to be
done?"

"I don't know, but I won't