Wherever you go, in town or country, you find those snowy houses, and always with masses of bright-colored flowers about them, but with no vines climbing their walls; vines cannot take hold of the smooth, hard whitewash.  Wherever you go, in the town or along the country roads, among little potato farms and patches or expensive country-seats, these stainless white dwellings, gleaming out from flowers and foliage, meet you at every turn.  The least little bit of a cottage is as white and blemishless as the stateliest mansion.  Nowhere is there dirt or stench, puddle or hog-wallow, neglect, disorder, or lack of trimness and neatness.  The roads, the streets, the dwellings, the people, the clothes—­this neatness extends to everything that falls under the eye.  It is the tidiest country in the world.  And very much the tidiest, too.

Considering these things, the question came up, Where do the poor live?  No answer was arrived at.  Therefore, we agreed to leave this conundrum for future statesmen to wrangle over.

What a bright and startling spectacle one of those blazing white country palaces, with its brown-tinted window-caps and ledges, and green shutters, and its wealth of caressing flowers and foliage, would be in black London!  And what a gleaming surprise it would be in nearly any American city one could mention, too!

Bermuda roads are made by cutting down a few inches into the solid white coral—­or a good many feet, where a hill intrudes itself—­and smoothing off the surface of the road-bed.  It is a simple and easy process.  The grain of the coral is coarse and porous; the road-bed has the look of being made of coarse white sugar.  Its excessive cleanness and whiteness are a trouble in one way:  the sun is reflected into your eyes with such energy as you walk along that you want to sneeze all the time.  Old Captain Tom Bowling found another difficulty.  He joined us in our walk, but kept wandering unrestfully to the roadside.  Finally he explained.  Said he, “Well, I chew, you know, and the road’s so plagued clean.”

We walked several miles that afternoon in the bewildering glare of the sun, the white roads, and the white buildings.  Our eyes got to paining us a good deal.  By and by a soothing, blessed twilight spread its cool balm around.  We looked up in pleased surprise and saw that it proceeded from an intensely black negro who was going by.  We answered his military salute in the grateful gloom of his near presence, and then passed on into the pitiless white glare again.

The colored women whom we met usually bowed and spoke; so did the children.  The colored men commonly gave the military salute.  They borrow this fashion from the soldiers, no doubt; England has kept a garrison here for generations.  The younger men’s custom of carrying small canes is also borrowed from the soldiers, I suppose, who always carry a cane, in Bermuda as everywhere else in Britain’s broad dominions.