pleased surprise and saw that it proceeded
from an intensely black negro who was going by. We answered his military
salute in the grateful gloom of his near presence, and then passed on
into the pitiless white glare again.

The colored women whom we met usually bowed and spoke; so did the
children. The colored men commonly gave the military salute. They
borrow this fashion from the soldiers, no doubt; England has kept a
garrison here for generations. The younger men's custom of carrying
small canes is also borrowed from the soldiers, I suppose, who always
carry a cane, in Bermuda as everywhere else in Britain's broad dominions.

The country roads curve and wind hither and thither in the delightfulest
way, unfolding pretty surprises at every turn: billowy masses of oleander
that seem to float out from behind distant projections like the pink
cloud-banks of sunset; sudden plunges among cottages and gardens, life
and activity, followed by as sudden plunges into the somber twilight and
stillness of the woods; flitting visions of white fortresses and beacon
towers pictured against the sky on remote hilltops; glimpses of shining
green sea caught for a moment through opening headlands, then lost again;
more woods and solitude; and by and by another turn lays bare, without
warning, the full sweep of the inland ocean, enriched with its bars of
soft color and graced with its wandering sails.

Take any road you please, you may depend upon it you will not stay in it
half a mile. Your road is everything that a road ought to be: it is
bordered with trees, and with strange plants and flowers; it is shady and
pleasant, or sunny and still pleasant; it carries you by the prettiest
and peacefulest and most homelike of homes, and through stretches of
forest that lie in a deep hush sometimes, and sometimes are alive with
the music of birds; it curves always, which is a continual promise,
whereas straight roads reveal everything at a glance and kill interest.
Your road is all this, and yet you will not stay in it half a mile, for
the reason that little seductive, mysterious roads are always branching
out from it on either hand, and as these curve sharply also and hide what
is beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your own chosen
road and explore them. You are usually paid for your trouble;
consequently, your walk inland always turns out to be one of the most
crooked, involved, purposeless, and interesting experiences a bo