dar-covered Bermuda of
to-day--"and the air made one sleepy, and the place was full of
noises"--the muttering and roaring of the sea among the islands and
between the reefs--"and there was a sou'-west wind that blistered one
all over." The Elizabethan mariner would not discriminate finely between
blisters and prickly heat; but the Bermudian of to-day will tell you
that the sou'-west or Lighthouse wind in summer brings that plague and
general discomfort. That the coral rock, battered by the sea, rings
hollow with strange sounds, answered by the winds in the little cramped
valleys, is a matter of common knowledge.

The man, refresht with some drink, then describes the geography of his
landing place,--the spot where Trinculo makes his first appearance. He
insists and reinsists on details which to him at one time meant life or
death, and the manager follows attentively. He can give his audience no
more than a few hangings and a placard for scenery, but that his lines
shall lift them beyond that bare show to the place he would have them,
the manager needs for himself the clearest possible understanding,--the
most ample detail. He must see the scene in the round--solid--ere he
peoples it. Much, doubtless, he discarded, but so closely did he keep to
his original informations that those who go to-day to a certain beach
some two miles from Hamilton will find the stage set for Act ii, Scene 2
of the 'Tempest,'--a bare beach, with the wind singing through the scrub
at the land's edge, a gap in the reefs wide enough for the passage of
Stephano's butt of sack, and (these eyes have seen it) a cave in the
coral within easy reach of the tide, whereto such a butt might be
conveniently rolled.

(My cellar is in a rock by the seaside where my wine is hid).

There is no other cave for some two miles.

Here's neither bush nor shrub; one is exposed to the wrath of "'yond
same black cloud," and here the currents strand wreckage. It was so well
done that, after three hundred years, a stray tripper and no Shakspere
scholar, recognized in a flash that old first set of all.

So far good. Up to this point the manager has gained little except some
suggestions for an opening scene, and some notion of an uncanny island.
The mariner (one cannot believe that Shakspere was mean in these little
things) is dipping to a deeper drunkenness. Suddenly he launches into a
preposterous tale of himself and his fellows, flung ashore, separated
from their offi