The man bowed until his face almost touched the hand he still held, and the surprise seemed for the moment to deprive him of power of speech. He courteously motioned his guests to precede him through an arbor of _poinsettia_ into a tropical garden on a cliff overhanging the water. "Harry," Marian continued, still excited by her experience, "this is Philip Hamlen--you've heard me speak so many times of him. My husband, Mr. Thatcher, Philip," she added, as the two men shook hands; then she presented him to the Stevenses. Outwardly Hamlen showed none of the confusion which Marian so plainly manifested. He was the self-contained host, seemingly interested in the coincidence of the unexpected meeting, but by no means exercised over it. "Welcome to my Garden of Eden," he said, smiling, as the magnificent expanse of cliff and sea greeted them--"thrice welcome, since to two of us this is in the nature of a reunion." It was a revelation even in spite of their expectations. Involuntarily the eye first took in the turquoise water and the crumbling, broken shore-line undershot by the caves formed by the pounding of centuries of waves against the layers of animal formation. Except for the great dry-dock and the naval barracks across the entrance to Hamilton Harbor, all seemed as Nature had intended it. Then, as the vision narrowed to its immediate surroundings, the visitors realized how much art had accomplished in making the garden into which their host had shown them seem so completely in harmony with the brilliant setting of its location. They had thought of Bermuda as the home of the Easter lily, not realizing that this is but a seasonal incident; they could not have believed it possible to make the luxuriant bloom of the tropical trees, shrubs, and flowers so subservient to the beauty of their foliage, yet so marvelous a finish to the brilliancy of the whole. The great rubber-tree extended its awkward branches in exactly the right directions to add quaint picturesqueness; the _poincianas_, as graceful as the rubber-tree was _gauche_, lifted their smooth, bare branches like elephant trunks, from which the great leaves hung down in magnificent clusters; the calabash, with its own ungainly beauty, proved its right by exactly fitting into the landscape at its own particular corner and the row of giant cabbage-palms stood like sentinels, adding a quiet dignity suggestive of the East. Between these and other massive trunks the smaller trees and flowering shrubs were interspersed in so original and bewildering a manner that each glance forced a new exclamation of delight. The night-blooming cereus crawled like an ugly reptile in and out among the branches of the giant cedars, but the bursting buds gave evidence that at nightfall they would redeem the hideous suggestiveness of the trailing vine. Cacti and sago-palms formed brilliant backgrounds for the lilies of novel shapes and colors,