I inquired, "Did he get the shirt?" "No." wrapped the trees to their very tops, and decorated them all over with couples and "How did you know it was a shirt he was clusters of great blue bells, a fine and after?" "I could see it in his eye." striking spectacle, at a little distance. But the dull cedar is everywhere, and it is the prevailing foliage. One does not appreciate how dull it is until the varnished, bright green attire of the infrequent lemon-tree pleasantly intrudes its contrast. In one thing, Bermuda is eminently tropical,—was in May, at least, We inquired around, but could hear of no Bermudian spider capable of doing these things. Citizens said that their largest spiders could not more than spread their legs over an ordinary saucer, and that they had always been considered honest. Here was testi--the unbrilliant, slightly faded, unrejoicing mony of a clergyman against the testimony of mere worldlings,-interested ones, too. On the whole, I judged it best to lock up my things. Here and there on the country roads we found lemon, papaia, orange, lime, and fig trees; also several sorts of palms, among among them the cocoa, the date, and the palmetto. We saw some bamboos forty feet high, with stems as thick as a man's arm. Jungles of the mangrove-tree stood up out of swamps, propped on their interlacing roots as upon a tangle of stilts. In dryer places the noble tamarind sent down its grateful cloud of shade. Here and there the blossomy tamarisk adorned the roadside. There was a curious gnarled and twisted black tree, without a single leaf on it. It might have passed itself off for a dead appletree but for the fact that it had a star-like, redhot flower sprinkled sparsely over its person. It had the scattery red glow that a constellation might have when glimpsed through smoked glass. It is possible that our constellations have been so constructed as to be invisible through smoked glass; if this is so it is a great mistake. We saw a tree that bears grapes, and just as calmly and unostentatiously as a vine would do it. We saw an india-rubber tree, but out of season, possibly, so there were no shoes on it, nor suspenders, nor anything that a person would properly expect to find there. This gave it an impressively fraudulent look. There was exactly one mahoganytree on the island. I know this to be reliable, because I saw a man who said he had counted it many a time and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a hare lip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel. Such men are all too few. One's eye caught near and far the pink cloud of the oleander and the red blaze of the pomegranate blossom. In one piece of wild wood the morning-glory vines had look of the landscape. For forests arrayed in a blemishless magnificence of glowing green foliage that seems to exult in its own existence, and can move the beholder to an enthusiasm that will make him either shout or cry, one must go to countries that have malignant winters. We saw scores of coloured farmers digging their crops of potatoes and onions, their wives and children helping,-entirely contented and comfortable, if looks go for anything. We never met a man, or woman, or child, anywhere in this sunny island, who seemed to be unprosperous or discontented, or sorry about anything. This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing. We felt the lack of something in this community,—a vague, an undefinable, 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 coloured 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 there a grain of dust. Here, as in Hamilton, 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 fire-arms came into such general use. the dwellings had Venetian blinds of a very sensible pattern. They were not double shutters, hinged at the sides, but a single board shutter, hinged at the top; you push it outward, from the bottom, and fasten it at any angle required by the sun or desired by yourself. All about the island one sees great white scars on the hill-slopes. These are dished spaces where the soil has been scraped off and the coral exposed and glazed with hard whitewash. Some of these are a quarteracre in size. They catch and carry the rain 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 fall to reservoirs; for the wells are few and lived." poor, and there are no natural springs and no brooks. 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 in 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. This began to look serious; but presently the boarder who sustained the hotel came, 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 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 his 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 They say that the Bermuda climate is mild and equable, with never any snow or ice, and that one may be very comfortable in spring clothing the year round, there. We had delightful and decided summer weather in May, with a flaming sun that permitted the thinnest of raiment, and yet there was a constant breeze; consequently we were never discomforted by heat. At four or five in the afternoon the mercury began to go down, and then it became necessary to change to thick garments. I went to St. George's in the morning clothed in the thinnest of linen, and reached home at five in the afternoon with two overcoats on. The nights are said to be always cool and bracing. We had mosquito nets, and the Reverend said the mosquitoes persecuted him a good deal. I often heard him slapping and banging at these imaginary creatures with as much zeal as if they had been real. There are no mosquitoes in the Bermudas in May. The poet Thomas Moore spent seven months in Bermuda more than seventy years ago. He was sent out to be registrar of the admiralty. I am not quite clear as to the function of a registrar of the admiralty of Bermuda, but I think it is his duty to keep a record of all the admirals born there. I will inquire into this. There was not much doing in admirals, and Moore got tired and went away. A reverently preserved souvenir of him is still one of the treasures of the islands. I gathered the idea, vaguely, that it was a jug, but was persistently thwarted in the twenty-two efforts I made to visit it. However, it was no matter, for I found afterwards that it was only a chair. There are several "sights" in the Bermu das, of course, but they are easily avoided. This is a great advantage,-one cannot have it in Europe. Bermuda is the right country for a jaded man to "loaf" in. There are no harassments; the deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and give his conscience a rest, and chloroform the legion of invisible small devils that are always trying to whitewash his hair. A good many Americans go there about the first of March and remain till the early spring weeks have finished their villainies at home. The Bermudians are hoping soon to have telegraphic communication with the world. But even after they shall have acquired this curse it will still be a good country to go to for a vacation, for there are charming little islets scattered about the inclosed sea where one could live secure from interruption. The telegraph boy would have to come in a boat, and one could easily kill him while he was making his landing. We had spent four days in Bermuda,— three bright ones out of doors and one rainy one in the house, we being disappointed about getting a yacht for a sail; and now our furlough was ended. We made the run home to New York quarantine in three days and five hours, and could have gone right along up to the city if we had had a health permit. But health permits are not granted after seven in the evening, partly because a ship cannot be inspected and overhauled with exhaustive thoroughness except in day light, and partly because health officers are liable to catch cold if they expose themselves to the night air. Still you can buy a permit after hours for five dollars extra, and the officer will do the inspecting next week. Our ship and passengers lay under expense and in humiliating captivity all night, under the very nose of the little official reptile who is supposed to protect New York from pestilence by his vigilant "inspections." This imposing rigour gave everybody a solemn and awful idea of the beneficent watchfulness of our government, and there were some who wondered if anything finer could be found in other countries. In the morning we were all a-tiptoe to witness the intricate ceremony of inspecting the ship. But it was a disappointing thing. The health officer's tug ranged alongside for a moment, our purser handed the lawful threedollar permit fee to the health officer's bootblack, who passed us a folded paper in a forked stick, and away we went. The entire "inspection' did not occupy thirteen seconds. The health officer's place is worth a hundred thousand dollars a year to him. His system of inspection is perfect, and therefore cannot be improved on; but it seems to me that his system of collecting his fees might be amended. For a great ship to lie idle all night is a costly loss of time; for her passengers to have to do the same thing works to them the same damage, with the addition of an amount of exasperation and bitterness of soul that the spectacle of the health-offi.. .1 could hardly sweeten. Now why should it not be better and simpler to let the ship pass in unmolested, and the fees and permits be exchanged once a year by post? MARK TWAIN. that "The Atlantic" had condemned the words which I When the proof of this article came to me I saw occupied the place where is now a vacancy. I can invent no figure worthy to stand in the shoes of the lurid colossus which a too decent respect for the opinions of mankind has thus ruthlessly banished from his due and rightful pedestal in the world's literature. Let the blank remain a blank; and let suggest to the reader that he has sustained a precious loss which can never be made good to him. M. T. ODIUM THEOLOGICUM : A REPLY TO SORDELLO. It is for the reader of the CANADIAN MONTHLY to consider whether the writer of it has not fallen-much to their lamentation ---into the opposite extreme; whether such an article as that does not in fact turn the CANADIAN MONTHLY-not the organ of any religious body-into an arena of theological strife. It surely will not take long to deter mine whether such phrases as, absolutely reeking with odium theologicum of the most malignant type," applied to a book-the corpus delicti in the case-written by a Methodist missionary; "that ineffable air of lofty spiritual pride which sits so easily on certain self-sufficient preachers of the gospel of humility," applied to the editor of what is called "a mushroom religious journal;" "for a journal such as this to be putting on ex cathedra infallible airs, setting itself up as an infallible judge of divine truth and an infallible interpreter of divine revelation, and dealing round cheap imitation thunder stolen from the Vatican" (is the thunder of the Vatican then cheap imitation ?) "when all the while it is merely showing its own ignorance of the commonest facts of ecclesiastical history, is a spectacle for the mirth of the gods -one to make the angels expire in peals of laughter." (We do not quite follow the association of "gods" and "angels," and do not feel altogether satisfied about angels breaking out into peals of laughter, and expiring). "It is too supremely ridiculous.' "Once upon a time a frog tried to swell itself out to the size of an ox. The frog burst ;" whether such language as this is the best suited of all to carry out that "holy work." There may be added the following-“ a church" (without a capital C, immediately following Church with one) "or rather a Provincial section of a church which is but a thing of yesterday." (Christianity was once "a thing of yesterday.") Again the writer of that article asks, "Is there any adequate plea to be urged in justification of the Methodist publisher who has disinterred that work from the limbo of obsolete rubbish where it was buried, and brought it to light in this country, where of all places it is calculated, by inflaming the sectarian hatred which perennially smoulders among us, to do most harm?" One would hardly have expected then to find, reprinted in that article and scattered broadcast through the Dominion for general readers, no less than twenty-five (if correctly counted) of the worst specimens of the style of that book, occupying more than a whole column of the CANADIAN MONTHLY. It is to be feared that, if little Jack Horner were permitted to put his thumb into the Christmas pie of this writer, he could pull out some more plums than those already tasted, by no means more deficient in flavour. But if he had pulled them out before baking, he might have said with good truth, and we would all pat him on the head, "What a good boy am I!" They could be reproduced here, but it is an example not tempting to follow. It would appear from the general tenor of SORDELLO'S article that he holds but one sole thing worthy of consideration—that is authority (a very good thing indeed if we have only not too much of it); the authority of individuals, of numbers, of duration of time, and so on. He says, "There is something which appeals to the imagination, something imposing in its grandeur, in the claim to infallibility by a Church hoar with antiquity, and hallowed by the stirring memories of nearly two thousand years; a Church which, during that time, has been the solace in this life, and the guide to that be yond the grave, to thousands of millions of hu- Last Supper-a like miracle performed, or man souls.' Then, in contrast to this, "A was there not? And, if not then, a fortiori church, or rather a provincial section of a not now. Nor is it a little remarkable that church, which is but a thing of yesterday, a the words uttered by Christ, on which alone little over a hundred years old, itself a creation any such modern miracles could be founded, of dissent, of the right of private judgment, are recorded by only one of the four and which, to-day, numbers as adherents Evangelists. This fact does not impugn the world over, only ten to twelve millions, all the authority of those words, but it does told—-” (has SORDELLO had the curiosity exhibit the degree of importance attached to to calculate that at the same rate of increase them by those other three writers who were during another like period, they will amount present, who were witnesses of what took to 121,000,000,000,000?) Then his pages place, and from whom alone we must rebristle with authorities, and there are no less ceive our impressions of what they saw and than twenty-eight foot-notes citing them, in heard. The miracle at Cana is circumstansupport of transubstantiation. And yet, lo! tially related, and the evidence of it is of after all, all this authority goes for nothing! course quite sufficient; but it is found in one The writer of all this declares himself a dis- of the gospels only, which shows that the believer in transubstantiation; asserts "the other three Evangelists did not look upon it right of private judgment"; and says, My as an event of any especial significance or belief respecting the Last Supper is, I fancy, importance. There is no circumstantial rethe same as that of the editor of the Guar- lation of any miracle at the Last Supper. In dian. It is that of Zwingli, namely, that comparison with such evidence as this, diChrist instituted the sacrament simply as a rect and indirect, positive and negative, of memorial, and intended the bread and wine the very disciples of Christ, who sat at the to be mere symbols." It is a little droll to table with Him, eat from the same dish and find the authority of Zwingli adduced in drank from the same cup, what is any other support of a belief so indisputably true. "authority" worth? Another fable here forces itself upon the memory; but, as that of the frog and the ox can scarcely be approved of in its application by SORDELLO, I will not quote it. 66 SORDELLO is a good deal excited over the phrase, "a piece of dough." It is hard to say what else it could be called, unless indeed it is baked (as to which I am not informed), when it would become a piece of bread. Does it undergo transubstantiation? Does it become anything else but a piece of dough or bread?" The change of water into wine, in the miracle at Cana," is cited as a case in point. With submission, there is no similarity. There, the water did undergo transubstantiation; it was changed into veritable wine; it looked like veritable wine; was drank as veritable wine; tasted like veritable wine; and was remarked upon with reference to its qualities as veritable wine. Now, does any one imagine that the bread and wine, which Christ took at the table and gave to His disciples, underwent a transubstantiation into actual, veritable flesh and blood?-that the disciples did-nay, I will go farther-could have eaten and drank them if they had been, as the guests at Cana drank the wine? Here is the one question was there at that time-at the "But," says SORDELLO's imaginary Roman Catholic, "Christ says, 'except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you,' and who am I that I should dare to give any other meaning to God's word than that which it naturally bears?" Now, unless I am misinformed, Roman Catholics do not take wine, bread only; how is this to be reconciled with the above? SORDELLO makes his imaginary Roman Catholic behave with a saintly moderation; I have no objection to that, except by contrast with the editor of the Guardian, who is made what has been already repeated, and is represented as speaking "with an aspect of thunder" (the cheap imitation thunder of the Vatican) "and the voice of a Boanerges." But I have not found all Roman Catholics blessed with a saintly moderation any more than all Protestants. It happened to this present writer, a short time ago, to find a Roman Catholic priest publishing the following in a newspaper (proof, with the paper itself, is at hand)—" If Christ purposely used words which He foresaw would lead astray, in a matter of the last importance, the whole Christian world for fifteen hundred years, and the large majority of Christians for three |