From pages 215-6
No sooner had Sam returned from overseeing rehearsals of Ab Sin in Baltimore than he planned another excursion with Joe Twichell, this one to Bermuda. He needed a sea voyage, he explained to Sue Crane, “to get the world & the devil out of my head so that I can start fresh at the farm early in June.” On May 16 the two friends sailed on a night boat from New Haven and the next day they embarked from New York on the steamer Bermuda for Sam's ‘first actual pleasure trip” in his life. The ship docked the morning of May 20 at Hamilton, the capital of the British territory. Though Sam had paused there briefly in 1867 on the return voyage of the Quaker City, he described it now as “a wonderfully white town; white as snow itself. White as marble; white as flour.” He and Twichell went to extraordinary lengths to travel incognito. They “brought no letters of introduction; our names had been misspelt in the passenger-list; nobody knew whether we were honest folk or otherwise.” Sam “traveled under an assumed name & was never molested with a polite attention from anybody.” They registered under cognomens—in Sams case, S. Langhorne—at a private boardinghouse where they were assigned “large, cool, well-lighted rooms on a second floor, overlooking a bloomy display of flowers and flowering shrubscalia.
During the four days Sam and Twichell spent in Bermuda—"three bright ones out of doors and one rainy one in the house"—the friends “roamed about Bermuda day & night & never ceased to gabble & enjoy"; drove to the town of St. George's; visited Devil’s Hole, a collapsed sea cavern; and attended a racially integrated Episcopal church service. Sam reveled in the cleanliness of the main island. “Nowhere is there dirt or stench, puddle or hog-wallow, neglect, disorder, or lack of trimness and neatness,” he wrote. “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.” The prosperity of the Bermudians also pleased him, though he “felt the lack of something in this community—a vague, an indefinable, an elusive something” that was missing until “after considerable thought we made out what it was—tramps,” his favorite flogging horse.
Sam and Twichell embarked on the Bermuda for their return to New York on May 24 and, the first day out from Hamilton, the ship encountered the bark Jonas Smith adrift without nautical instruments, Sam was intrigued by the plight of the crew and wrote a letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant about the tramp steamer upon his return, though by that time the ship had been assisted by a revenue cutter. The Bermuda landed back in New York on Sunday, May 27, and, in retrospect, Sam’s only regret was that Howells had not joined them on the trip. “If you had gone with us & let me pay the $50 which the trip, & the board & the various nick-nacks & mementoes would cost," he wrote his friend, “I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation to pay me 500 per cent profit in the way of the several magazine articles which I could have written, whereas I can now write only one or two & am therefore largely out of pocket by your proud ways.” Twichell, too, expressed his appreciation to Sam for sponsoring his holiday. “I'm afraid I shall not see as green a spot again soon,” he wrote. “And it was your invention and your gift. And your company was the best of it. Indeed, I never took more comfort in being with you than on this journey, which, my boy, is saying a great deal.” He had “derived very marked physical benefit from the recreation and rest." Sam had enjoyed the trip no less than Twichell, as he acknowledged in reply: “It was much the joyousest trip I ever had, Joe—not a heartache in it, not a twinge of conscience,”