Curtis was not mistaken. At about three o'clock the lookout man
sung out that there was land to windward, and descried what
seemed as if it might be a line of smoke in the north-east
horizon. At six, I went on deck with M. Letourneur and his son,
and we could then distinctly make out the low group of the
Bermudas, encircled by their formidable chain of breakers.

"There," said Andre Letourneur to me, as we stood gazing at the
distant land, "there lies the enchanted Archipelago, sung by your
poet Moore. The exile Waller, too, as long ago as 1643, wrote an
enthusiastic panegyric on the islands, and I have been told that
at one time English ladies would wear no other bonnets than such
as were made of the leaves of the Bermuda palm."

"Yes," I replied, "the Bermudas were all the rage in the
seventeenth century, although laterly they have fallen into
comparative oblivion."

"But let me tell you, M. Andre," interposed Curtis, who had as
usual joined our party, "that although poets may rave, and be as
enthusiastic as they like about these islands, sailors will tell
a different tale. The hidden reefs that lie in a semicircle
about two or three leagues from shore make the attempt to land a
very dangerous piece of business. And another thing, I know.
Let the natives boast as they will about their splendid climate,
they, are visited by the most frightful hurricanes. They get the
fag-end of the storms that rage over the Antilles; and the fag-
end of a storm is like the tail of a whale; it's just the
strongest bit of it. I don't think you'll find a sailor