the story as he knew it. The vessel had shipped the crew,
on a basis of passage to New York, in exchange for labor. So it was a
"pleasure-excursion!" Clemens dwelt on this fancy:

I have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the
list. It is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found I
should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his
venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners
tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn
solitudes of the ocean.

Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with
the relentless Gulf Stream. Perhaps she reached New York in time; one
would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out.

That first Bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to Mark Twain. To
Twichell he wrote that it was the "joyousest trip" he had ever made:

Not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. I often come
to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that
had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we
had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four.

There was but one regret: Howells had not been with them. Clemens
denounced him for his absence:

If you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the
trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would
cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation
to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several
magazine articles which I could have written; whereas I can now
write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by
your proud ways.

Clemens would not fail to write about his trip. He could not help doing
that, and he began "Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion" as soon as
he landed in Hartford. They were quite what the name would signify
--leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful vacation. They
are not startling in their humor or description, but are gently amusing
and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies of Bermuda.
Howells, shut up in a Boston editorial office, found them delightful
enough, and very likely his Atlantic readers agreed with him. The story
of "Isaac and the Prophets of Baal" was one that Capt. Ned Wakeman had
told to Twichell during a voyage which the latter had made to Aspinwall
with that vi