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 quarter-acre in size. They catch and carry the rainfall to reservoirs; for the wells are few and poor, and there are no natural springs and no brooks.

Flatts Village arose at the crossroads between Smith’s Parish and Hamilton Parish, and in the twentieth century would become the site of the public Aquarium, Natural History Museum, and Zoo, an institution that easily eclipsed Devil’s Hole. Flatts embraced a picturesque inlet through which the ocean fed Harrington Sound, a large saltwater lagoon. Water rushes in or out beneath the Flatts bridge at every change of tide.

He slighted the usual tourist sights in the “Idle Excursion,” but his notebook showed that he visited Devil’s Hole, the oldest attraction on the Islands. “Devil’s Hole,” his note read, “angel fish, blue & yellow.” The collapsed sea cavern, also known as Neptune’s Grotto or Groupers’ Grotto, had been a commercial operation since the 1830s. Situated by Harrington Sound, in Smith’s Parish, it was fed instead by a narrow passage to the ocean.

The country roads curve and wind hither and thither in the delightfulest way, unfolding pretty surprises at every turn: billowy masses of oleander that seem to float out from behind distant projections like the pink cloud-banks of sunset; sudden plunges among cottages and gardens, life and activity, followed by as sudden plunges into the somber twilight and stillness of the woods; flitting visions of white fortresses and beacon towers pictured against the sky on remote hilltops; glimpses of shining green sea caught for a moment through opening headlands, then lost again; more woods an

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.

Clemens had confused the population of Hamilton, which Harper’s Monthly estimated at no more than 2,000, with the entire population of the Islands, given in the census of 1871 as 12,121. Nor were the races equally divided; the census showed 7,396 colored persons and 4,725 whites:   The women and young girls, black and white, who occasionally passed by, were nicely clad, and many were elegantly and fashionably so.

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.