th
its glittering belts of blue and green where moderate soundings were,
and its broad splotches of rich brown where the rocks lay near the
surface. Everybody was feeling so well that even the grave, pale young
man (who, by a sort of kindly common consent, had come latterly to be
referred to as "The Ass") received frequent and friendly notice--which
was right enough, for there was no harm in him.

At last we steamed between two island points whose rocky jaws allowed
only just enough room for the vessel's body, and now before us loomed
Hamilton on her clustered hillsides and summits, the whitest mass of
terraced architecture that exists in the world, perhaps.

It was Sunday afternoon, and on the pier were gathered one or two
hundred Bermudians, half of them black, half of them white, and all of
them nobbily dressed, as the poet says.

Several boats came off to the ship, bringing citizens. One of these
citizens was a faded, diminutive old gentleman, who approached our most
ancient passenger with a childlike joy in his twinkling eyes, halted
before him, folded his arms, and said, smiling with all his might and
with all the simple delight that was in him, "You don't know me, John!
Come, out with it now; you know you don't!"

The ancient passenger scanned him perplexedly, scanned the napless,
threadbare costume of venerable fashion that had done Sunday service no
man knows how many years, contemplated the marvelous stovepipe hat of
still more ancient and venerable pattern, with its poor, pathetic old
stiff brim canted up "gallusly" in the wrong places, and said, with a
hesitation that indicated strong internal effort to "place" the gentle
old apparition, "Why... let me see... plague on it... there's something
about you that... er... er... but I've been gone from Bermuda for
twenty-seven years, and... hum, hum ... I don't seem to get at it,
somehow, but there's something about you that is just as familiar to me
as--"

"Likely it might be his hat," murmured the Ass, with innocent,
sympathetic interest.

So the Reverend and I had at last arrived at Hamilton, the principal
town in the Bermuda Islands. A wonderfully white town; white as snow
itself. White as marble; white as flour. Yet looking like none of these,
exactly. Never mind, we said; we shall hit upon a figure by and by that
will describe this peculiar white.

It was a town that was compacted together upon the sides and tops of
a cluster of small hills. Its outl