'What care these brawlers for the name of King?'
--strikes the manager's ear, and he stands behind the talkers. Perhaps only one-tenth of the earnestly delivered, hand-on-shoulder sea talk was actually used of all that was automatically and unconsciously stored by the island man who knew all inland arts and crafts. Nor is it too fanciful to imagine a half-turn to the second listener as the mariner, banning his luck as mariners will, says there are those who would not give a doit to a poor man while they will lay out ten to see a raree-show,--a dead Indian. Were he in foreign parts, as he now is in England, he could show people something in the way of strange fish. Is it to consider too curiously to see a drink ensue on this hint (the manager dealt but little in his plays with the sea at first hand, and his instinct for new words would have been waked by what he had already caught), and with the drink a sailor's minute description of how he went across the reefs to the island of his calamity,--or islands rather, for there were many? Some you could almost carry away in your pocket. They were sown broadcast like--like the nut-shells on the stage there.
"Many islands, in truth," says the manager patiently, and afterwards his Sebastian says to Antonio:
I think he will carry the island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple.
And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands.
"But what was the island like?" says the manager. The sailor tries to explain. "It was green, with yellow in it; a tawny-colored country"--the color, that is to say, of the coral-beached, cedar-covered Bermuda of to-day--"and the air made one sleepy, and the place was full of noises"--the muttering and roaring of the sea among the islands and between the reefs--"and there was a sou'-west wind that blistered one all over." The Elizabethan mariner would not discriminate finely between blisters and prickly heat; but the Bermudian of to-day will tell you that the sou'-west or Lighthouse wind in summer brings that plague and general discomfort. That the coral rock, battered by the sea, rings hollow with strange sounds, answered by the winds in the little cramped valleys, is a matter of common knowledge.