We went ashore and found a novelty of a pleasant nature:  there were no hackmen, hacks, or omnibuses on the pier or about it anywhere, and nobody offered his services to us, or molested us in any way.  I said it was like being in heaven.  The Reverend rebukingly and rather pointedly advised me to make the most of it, then.  We knew of a boarding-house, and what we needed now was somebody to pilot us to it.  Presently a little barefooted colored boy came along, whose raggedness was conspicuously not Bermudian.  His rear was so marvelously bepatched with colored squares and triangles that one was half persuaded he had got it out of an atlas.  When the sun struck him right, he was as good to follow as a lightning-bug.  We hired him and dropped into his wake.  He piloted us through one picturesque street after another, and in due course deposited us where we belonged.  He charged nothing for his map, and but a trifle for his services:  so the Reverend doubled it.  The little chap received the money with a beaming applause in his eye which plainly said, “This man’s an onion!”

We had brought no letters of introduction; our names had been misspelled in the passenger-list; nobody knew whether we were honest folk or otherwise.  So we were expecting to have a good private time in case there was nothing in our general aspect to close boarding-house doors against us.  We had no trouble.  Bermuda has had but little experience of rascals, and is not suspicious.  We got large, cool, well-lighted rooms on a second floor, overlooking a bloomy display of flowers and flowering shrubscalia and annunciation lilies, lantanas, heliotrope, jasmine, roses, pinks, double geraniums, oleanders, pomegranates, blue morning-glories of a great size, and many plants that were unknown to me.

We took a long afternoon walk, and soon found out that that exceedingly white town was built of blocks of white coral.  Bermuda is a coral island, with a six-inch crust of soil on top of it, and every man has a quarry on his own premises.  Everywhere you go you see square recesses cut into the hillsides, with perpendicular walls unmarred by crack or crevice, and perhaps you fancy that a house grew out of the ground there, and has been removed in a single piece from the mold.  If you do, you err.  But the material for a house has been quarried there.  They cut right down through the coral, to any depth that is convenient—­ten to twenty feet—­and take it out in great square blocks.  This cutting is done with a chisel that has a handle twelve or fifteen feet long, and is used as one uses a crowbar when he is drilling a hole, or a dasher when he is churning.  Thus soft is this stone.  Then with a common handsaw they saw the great blocks into handsome, huge bricks that are two feet long, a foot wide, and about six inches thick.  These stand loosely piled during a month to harden; then the work of building begins.