l."

"Well, hell _is_."

"There you goes again, Tom Bull!" cries my uncle, with a sniff and
wrathful twitch of the lip. "There you goes again, you dunderhead--jumpin'
t' conclusions!"

Tom Bull was shocked.

"Hell God-forsaken!" growls my uncle. "They's more hard labor for the
good Lord t' do in hell, Tom Bull, than any place I knows on; an' I
'low He's right there, kep' double watches on the jump, a-doin' of
it!"

Twist Tickle pursues an attenuated way between the Twins, broadening
into the harbor basin beyond the Pillar o' Cloud, narrowing at the
Finger and Thumb, widening, once more, into the lower harbor, and
escaping to the sea, at last, between Pretty Willie and the Lost Soul,
which are great bare heads. You get a glimpse of the Tickle from the
deck of the mail-boat: this when she rounds the Cocked Hat and
wallows off towards Gentleman Cove. 'Tis but a niggardly glimpse at
best, and vastly unfair to the graces of the place: a white house, wee
and listlessly tilted, gripping a rock, as with expiring interest; a
reach of placid water, deep and shadowy, from which rise the hills,
gray, rugged, splashed with green; heights beyond, scarfed with
clinging wisps of mist.

The white houses are builded in a fashion the most disorderly at the
edge of the tickle, strung clear from the narrows to the Lost Soul and
straying somewhat upon the slopes, with the scrawny-legged flakes
clinging to the bare declivities and the stages squatted at the
water-side; but some houses, whose tenants are solitary folk made
morose by company, congregate in the remoter coves--where the shore is
the shore of the open sea and there is no crowd to trouble--whence
paths scramble over the hills to the Tickle settlement. My uncle's
cottage sat respectably, even with some superiority, upon a narrow
neck of rock by the Lost Soul, outlooking, westerly, to sea, but in
the opposite direction dwelling in a way more intimate and fond upon
the unruffled water of Old Wives' Cove, within the harbor, where rode
the _Shining Light_.

"An' there she'll lie," he was used to saying, with a grave and
mysteriously significant wink, "until I've sore need o' she."

"Ay," said they, "or till she rots, plank an' strand."

"An she rots," says my uncle, "she may rot: for she'll sail these
here waters, sound or rotten, by the Lord! an I just put her to it."

Unhappy, then, perhaps, Twin Islands, in situation and prospect; but
the folk of that harbor, who deal b