TOM SAWYER ABROAD TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE
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Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion              301
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 at 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. Things began to look serious; but presently the boarder who sustained the hotel came in, 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 it proved to be only pepper of a particularly vivacious kind. And we had an iron-clad chicken that was de­liriously 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 there a grain of dust. Here, as in Hamilton, the dwellings had Venetian blinds of a very sensible pattern. They were not double shutters, hinged at the sides, but a single broad shutter, hinged at the top; you push it outward, from