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 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; consequently, 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 variety. 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 sea 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 are tired of it—if you are so constituted as to be able to get tired of it.

You may march the country roads in maiden meditation fancy free, by field and farm, for no dog will plunge out at you from unsuspected gate, with breath-taking surprise of ferocious bark, notwithstanding it is a Christian land and a civilised. 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 afternoon, 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 questioned 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, by 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 around 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.'

6

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 intending 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. Yelverton-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, carrying the remains with her. That closed our intercourse with the Joneses. Mr. 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 night he tried that trap on his neck, and it fitted him so, and was so sort of satisfactory, that he laid down and 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-bethat-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 considered 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 yards 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 warn't worth a cancelled postagestamp, any way, taking the average of cats here; but I lost the case. What could I expect? The system is all wrong here, and is bound to make revolution and bloodshed some day. You see, they give the magistrate a poor little starvation salary, and then 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 currency?'

"Yes-onions. And they were forty per cent. discount, 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 Mrs. Brown had named a child after me. So she changed its name right away. She is a Baptist. Well, in the course of baptizing it over again, it got drowned. I was hoping we might get to be friendly again some time or other, but of course this drowning the child knocked that all out of the question. It would

now.

have saved a world of heart-break and ill blood if she had named it dry.'

I knew by the sigh 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 island dignitaries, could command such a mark of respect as this. Then a shudder shook him and me at the same moment, and I knew that we had jumped to one and the same conclusion: 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. Smith ?'

6

Why, certainly they would, if he was dead.'

That seemed to 'size' the country again.

192

Patineuse.

How you glance and glint and glow
Through the snow!

How you shoot and skim and sail
At the gale!

Flashing hither, gliding thither,

O'er the level, through the hollow;
Hardly heeding whence or whither,
Swiftly, shrilly as a swallow;
Flitting fast on fairy feet,

Like a sunbeam over ocean;
You're a strophe suave and sweet
Of the poetry of motion;
And, you rosy Spirit of Frost,
You forget

That I see you-to my cost,
My Coquette !

What she will, let Lucy say
From the sleigh;

They're contented, He and She-
Look at me!

Look at me afar, enraptured

With the fancy of your pleasure! Hear my heart, the heart you've captured, Moving with you to the measure

Of those dear and dainty feet

That, along the ice a-ringing,

Echoes all so clear and sweet

Through my happy thought are flinging, That about me sinks and swells