"Yes," said I, "some things."
"I like the cool way in which he takes bad fixes," continued Rectus, who had a fancy for doing things that way himself. "Don't you remember that time he struck on the sand-bank. He just sat there in the rain, waiting for the tide to rise, and made no fuss at all. And here, he kept just as cool and comfortable, down in that dungeon. He must have educated his mind a good deal to be able to do that."
"It may be very well to educate the mind to take things coolly," said I, "but I'd a great deal rather educate my mind not to get me into such fixes."
"I suppose that would be better," said Rectus, after thinking a minute.
And now we had but little time to see anything more in Nassau. In two days the "Tigris" would be due, and we were going away in her. So we found we should have to bounce around in a pretty lively way, if we wanted to be able to go home and say we had seen the place.
CHAPTER XVII.
WHAT BOY HAS DONE, BOY MAY DO.
There was one place that I wished, particularly, to visit before I left, and that was what the people in Nassau called the Coral-reef. There were lots of coral-reefs all about the islands, but this one was easily visited, and for this reason, I suppose, was chosen as a representative of its class. I had been there before, and had seen all the wonders of the reef through a water-glass,—which is a wooden box, with a pane of glass at one end and open at the other. You hold the glass end of this box just under the water, and put your face to the open end, and then you can see down under the water, exactly as if you were looking through the air. And on this coral-reef, where the water was not more than twelve or fourteen feet deep, there were lots of beautiful things to see. It was like a submarine garden. There was coral in every form and shape, and of different colors; there were sea-feathers, which stood up like waving purple trees, most of them a foot or two high, but some a good deal higher; there were sea-fans, purple and yellow, that spread themselves up from the curious bits of coral-rock on the bottom, and there were ever so many other things that grew like bushes and vines, and of all sorts of colors. Among all these you could see the fishes swimming about, as if they were in a great aquarium. Some of these fishes were very large, with handsome black bands across their backs, but the prettiest were some little fellows, no bigger than sardines, that swam in among the branches of the sea-feathers and fans. They were colored bright blue, and yellow and red; some of them with two or three colors apiece. Rectus called them "humming-fishes." They did remind me of humming-birds, although they didn't hum.
When I came here before, I was with a party of ladies and gentlemen. We went in a large sail-boat, and took several divers with us, to go down and bring up to us the curious things that we would select, as we looked through the water-glass. There wasn't anything peculiar about these divers. They wore linen breeches for diving dresses, and were the same kind of fellows as those who dived for pennies at the town.