What there is of Mauritius is beautiful.  You have undulating wide expanses of sugar-cane—­a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye; and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains, some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view.

That is Mauritius; and pretty enough.  The details are few, the massed result is charming, but not imposing; not riotous, not exciting; it is a Sunday landscape.  Perspective, and the enchantments wrought by distance, are wanting.  There are no distances; there is no perspective, so to speak.  Fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision.  Mauritius is a garden and a park combined.  It affects one’s emotions as parks and gardens affect them.  The surfaces of one’s spiritual deeps are pleasantly played upon, the deeps themselves are not reached, not stirred.  Spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense of mystery which haunts apparently inaccessible mountain domes and summits reposing in the sky—­these are the things which exalt the spirit and move it to see visions and dream dreams.

The Sandwich Islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing in the matter of tropical islands.  I would add another story to Mauna Loa’s 16,000 feet if I could, and make it particularly bold and steep and craggy and forbidding and snowy; and I would make the volcano spout its lava-floods out of its summit instead of its sides; but aside from these non-essentials I have no corrections to suggest.  I hope these will be attended to; I do not wish to have to speak of it again.

CHAPTER LXIV.

When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do:  throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker.  The former is the quickest. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

The Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in these seas.  She is thoroughly modern, and that statement covers a great deal of ground.  She has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed—­she has imperfect beds.  Many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good ones.  In the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly edited, from the beginning.  The selection of the beds is given to some hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia.  Nothing is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so difficult to make.  Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no ship ever does or ever did.  In Noah’s Ark the beds were simply scandalous.  Noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of modification or another till the next flood.