ed a roadside grocery with a sign up, "Potatoes Wanted." An
ignorant stranger, doubtless. He could not have gone thirty steps from
his place without finding plenty of them.

In several fields the arrowroot crop was already sprouting. Bermuda used
to make a vast annual profit out of this staple before firearms came
into such general use.

The island is not large. Somewhere in the interior a man ahead of us
had a very slow horse. I suggested that we had better go by him; but
the driver said the man had but a little way to go. I waited to see,
wondering how he could know. Presently the man did turn down another
road. I asked, "How did you know he would?"

"Because I knew the man, and where he lived."

I asked him, satirically, if he knew everybody in the island; he
answered, very simply, that he did. This gives a body's mind a good
substantial grip on the dimensions of the place.

At the principal hotel at St. George's, a young girl, with a sweet,
serious face, said we could not be furnished with dinner, because we had
not been expected, and no preparation had been made. Yet it was still an
hour before dinner-time. We argued, she yielded not; we supplicated,
she was serene. The hotel had not been expecting an inundation of two
people, and so it seemed that we should have to go home dinnerless. I
said we were not very hungry a fish would do. My little maid answered,
it was not the market-day for fish. Things began to look serious; but
presently the boarder who sustained the hotel came in, and when the case
was laid before him he was cheerfully willing to divide. So we had much
pleasant chat at table about St. George's chief industry, the repairing
of damaged ships; and in between we had a soup that had something in it
that seemed to taste like the hereafter, but it proved to be only pepper
of a particularly vivacious kind. And we had an iron-clad chicken that
was deliciously cooked, but not in the right way. Baking was not
the thing to convince this sort. He ought to have been put through a
quartz-mill until the "tuck" was taken out of him, and then boiled till
we came again. We got a good deal of sport out of him, but not enough
sustenance to leave the victory on our side. No matter; we had potatoes
and a pie and a sociable good time. Then a ramble through the town,
which is a quaint one, with interesting, crooked streets, and narrow,
crooked lanes, with here and there a grain of dust. Here, as in
Hamilton, the dwelli