We felt the lack of something in this community—­a vague, an indefinable, an elusive something, and yet a lack.  But after considerable thought we made out what it was—­tramps.  Let them go there, right now, in a body.  It is utterly virgin soil.  Passage is cheap.  Every true patriot in America will help buy tickets.  Whole armies of these excellent beings can be spared from our midst and our polls; they will find a delicious climate and a green, kind-hearted people.  There are potatoes and onions for all, and a generous welcome for the first batch that arrives, and elegant graves for the second.

It was the Early Rose potato the people were digging.  Later in the year they have another crop, which they call the Garnet.  We buy their potatoes (retail) at fifteen dollars a barrel; and those colored farmers buy ours for a song, and live on them.  Havana might exchange cigars with Connecticut in the same advantageous way, if she thought of it.

We passed 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