thirty steps from his place without finding plenty of them.

In several fields the arrowroot crop was already sprouting. Bermuda used to make a vast annual profit out of this staple before fire-arms came into such general use.

The island is not large. Somewhere in the interior a man ahead of us had a very slow horse. I suggested that we had better go by him; but the driver said the man had but a little way to go. I waited to see, wondering how he could know. Presently the man did turn down another road. I asked, "How did you know he would?"

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 board shutter, hinged at the top; you push it outward, from the bottom, and fasten it at any angle required by the sun or desired by yourself.

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 quarteracre in size. They catch and carry the rain

I asked him, satirically, if he knew everybody in the 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 in 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. This began to look serious; but presently the boarder who sustained the hotel came, 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 proved to be only pepper of a particularly vivacious kind. And we had an iron-clad chicken that was deliciously 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

poor, and there are no natural springs and no brooks.

They say that the Bermuda climate is mild and equable, with never any snow or ice, and that one may be very comfortable in spring clothing the year round, there. We had delightful and decided summer weather in May, with a flaming sun that permitted the thinnest of raiment, and yet there was a constant breeze; consequently we were never discomforted by heat. At four or five in the afternoon the mercury began to go down, and then it became necessary to change to thick garments. I went to St. George's in the morning clothed in the thinnest of linen, and reached home at five in the afternoon with two overcoats on. The nights are said to be always cool and bracing. We had mosquito nets, and the Reverend said the mosquitoes persecuted him a good deal. I often heard him slapping and banging at these imaginary creatures with as much zeal as if they had been real. There are no mosquitoes in the Bermudas in May.

The poet Thomas Moore spent seven months in Bermuda more than seventy years ago. He was sent out to be registrar of the admiralty. I am not quite clear as to the function of a registrar of the admiralty of Bermuda, but I think it is his duty to keep a record of all the admirals born there. I will inquire into this. There was not much doing in admirals, and Moore got tired and went away. A reverently preserved souvenir of him is still one of the treasures of the islands. I gathered the idea, vaguely, that it was a jug, but was persistently thwarted in the twenty-two efforts I made to visit it. However, it was no matter, for I found afterwards that it was only a chair.

There are several "sights" in the Bermu

I

N the CANADIAN MONTHLY for December there was an article which began by putting this question-" Odium theologicum or charity; which? " "Bear and forbear," it proceeds, "should be the motto on both sides, nor can a national magazine like the CANADIAN MONTHLY engage in a holier work than that of using whatever influence it may possess to disseminate the spirit inculcated by that maxim, and to discountenance its opposite."

Let us examine how that "holy work" is carried out in that article.

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It is for the reader of the CANADIAN MONTHLY to consider whether the writer of it has not fallen-much to their lamentation ---into the opposite extreme; whether such an article as that does not in fact turn the CANADIAN MONTHLY-not the organ of any religious body-into an arena of theological strife. It surely will not take long to deter mine whether such phrases as, absolutely reeking with odium theologicum of the most malignant type," applied to a book-the corpus delicti in the case-written by a Methodist missionary; "that ineffable air of lofty spiritual pride which sits so easily on certain self-sufficient preachers of the gospel of humility," applied to the editor of what is called "a mushroom religious journal;" "for a journal such as this to be putting on ex cathedra infallible airs, setting itself up as an infallible judge of divine truth and an infallible interpreter of divine revelation, and dealing round cheap imitation thunder stolen from the Vatican" (is the thunder of the Vatican then cheap imitation?) "when all the while it is merely showing its own ignorance of the commonest facts of ecclesiastical history, is a spectacle for the mirth of the gods -one to make the angels expire in peals of laughter." (We do not quite follow the association of "gods" and "angels," and do not feel altogether satisfied about angels breaking out into peals of laughter, and expiring). "It is too supremely ridiculous." "Once upon a time a frog tried to swell itself out to the size of an ox. The frog burst ;”The frog burst;"

whether such language as this is the best suited of all to carry out that "holy work." There may be added the following-"a church" (without a capital C, immediately following Church with one) "or rather a Provincial section of a church which is but a thing of yesterday." (Christianity was once "a thing of yesterday.")

Again the writer of that article asks, “Is there any adequate plea to be urged in justification of the Methodist publisher who has disinterred that work from the limbo of obsolete rubbish where it was buried, and brought it to light in this country, where of all places it is calculated, by inflaming the sectarian hatred which perennially smoulders among us, to do most harm?" One would hardly have expected then to find, reprinted in that article and scattered broadcast through the Dominion for general readers, no less than twenty-five (if correctly counted) of the worst specimens of the style of that book, occupying more than a whole column of the CANADIAN MONTHLY. It is to be feared that, if little Jack Horner were permitted to put his thumb into the Christmas pie of this writer, he could pull out some more plums than those already tasted, by no means more deficient in flavour. But if he had pulled them out before baking, he might have said with good truth, and we would all pat him on the head, "What a good boy am I!" They could be reproduced here, but it is an example not tempting to follow.

It would appear from the general tenor of SORDELLO'S article that he holds but one sole thing worthy of consideration—that is authority (a very good thing indeed if we have only not too much of it); the authority of individuals, of numbers, of duration of time, and so on. He says, "There is something which appeals to the imagination, something imposing in its grandeur, in the claim to infallibility by a Church hoar with antiquity, and hallowed by the stirring memories of nearly two thousand years; a Church which, during that time, has been the solace in this life, and the guide to that be

yond the grave, to thousands of millions of human souls." Then, in contrast to this, "A church, or rather a provincial section of a church, which is but a thing of yesterday, a little over a hundred years old, itself a creation of dissent, of the right of private judgment, and which, to-day, numbers as adherents the world over, only ten to twelve millions, all told" (bas SORDELLO had the curiosity to calculate that at the same rate of increase during another like period, they will amount to 121,000,000,000,000?) Then his pages bristle with authorities, and there are no less than twenty-eight foot-notes citing them, in support of transubstantiation. And yet, lo! after all, all this authority goes for nothing! The writer of all this declares himself a disbeliever in transubstantiation; asserts "the right of private judgment"; and says, "My belief respecting the Last Supper is, I fancy, the same as that of the editor of the Guardian. It is that of Zwingli, namely, that Christ instituted the sacrament simply as a memorial, and intended the bread and wine to be mere symbols." It is a little droll to find the authority of Zwingli adduced in support of a belief so indisputably true. Another fable here forces itself upon the memory; but, as that of the frog and the ox can scarcely be approved of in its application by SORDELLO, I will not quote it.

SORDELLO is a good deal excited over the phrase, "a piece of dough." It is hard to say what else it could be called, unless indeed it is baked (as to which I am not informed), when it would become a piece of bread. Does it undergo transubstantiation? Does it become anything else but a piece of dough or bread? "The change of water into wine, in the miracle at Cana," is cited as a case in point. With submission, there is no similarity. There, the water did undergo transubstantiation; it was changed into veritable wine; it looked like veritable wine; was drank as veritable wine; tasted like veritable wine; and was remarked upon with reference to its qualities as veritable wine. Now, does any one imagine that the bread and wine, which Christ took at the table and gave to His disciples, underwent a transubstantiation into actual, veritable flesh and blood?-that the disciples didnay, I will go farther-could have eaten and drank them if they had been, as the guests at Cana drank the wine? Here is the one question was there at that time-at the

Last Supper-a like miracle performed, or was there not? And, if not then, a fortiori not now. Nor is it a little remarkable that the words uttered by Christ, on which alone any such modern miracles could be founded, are recorded by only one of the four Evangelists. This fact does not impugn the authority of those words, but it does exhibit the degree of importance attached to them by those other three writers who were present, who were witnesses of what took place, and from whom alone we must receive our impressions of what they saw and heard. The miracle at Cana is circumstantially related, and the evidence of it is of course quite sufficient ; but it is found in one of the gospels only, which shows that the other three Evangelists did not look upon it as an event of any especial significance or importance. There is no circumstantial relation of any miracle at the Last Supper. In comparison with such evidence as this, direct and indirect, positive and negative, of the very disciples of Christ, who sat at the table with Him, eat from the same dish and drank from the same cup, what is any other "authority" worth?

6

"But," says SORDELLO'S imaginary Roman Catholic, "Christ says, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you,' and who am I that I should dare to give any other meaning to God's word than that which it naturally bears?" Now, unless I am misinformed, Roman Catholics do not take wine, bread only; how is this to be reconciled with the above?

SORDELLO makes his imaginary Roman Catholic behave with a saintly moderation; I have no objection to that, except by contrast with the editor of the Guardian, who is made what has been already repeated, and is represented as speaking with an aspect of thunder" (the cheap imitation thunder of the Vatican) "and the voice of a Boanerges." But I have not found all Roman Catholics blessed with a saintly moderation any more than all Protestants. It happened to this present writer, a short time ago, to find a Roman Catholic priest publishing the following in a newspaper (proof, with the paper itself, is at hand)—" If Christ purposely used words which He foresaw would lead astray, in a matter of the last importance, the whole Christian world for fifteen hundred years, and the large majority of Christians for three