"I wanted to be a soldier," he said, "and my father wouldn't let me. I
often used to wish I had run away and enlisted, when I was with
Quarter-master McCulloch, of the Engineers (he'd risen from the ranks
and was younger than me), in Bermuda."
"Bermuda! That's not very far from South America, is it?" said I,
looking across to the big map of the world. "Is it very beautiful, too?"
The school-master's eyes contracted as if he were short-sighted, or
looking at something inside his own head. But he smiled as he answered--
"The poet says,
'A pleasing land of drowsy-head it is,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky.'"
"But are there any curious beasts and plants and that sort of thing?" I
asked.
"I believe there were no native animals originally," said the
school-master. "I mean inland ones. But the fowls of the air and the
fishes of the sea are of all lovely forms and colours. And such corals
and sponges, and sea-anemones, blooming like flowers in the transparent
pools of the warm blue water that washes the coral reefs and fills the
little creeks and bays!"
I gasped--and he went on.
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