To locate the next of these “Forgotten Isles,” and the most completely forgotten of all of them, you had better get out the family atlas and, with a ruler and a pencil, do a little Morris-chair exploring. Draw a line due south from Cape Verde, which is the westernmost point of Africa, and another line due east from Cape San Roque, which is the easternmost point in South America, and where those two lines meet, out in the wastes of the South Atlantic, you will find a barren rock which resembles, as, indeed, it is, an extinct and partially submerged volcano. This rock, which is considerably smaller than its sister island of Saint Helena, seven hundred miles away, is officially designated by the British Government as H.M.S. “Ascension.” Entirely under the control and jurisdiction of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, it is unique in that it is the only island in the world which has the rating of a man-o'-war, being garrisoned, or rather manned, by a detachment of sailors and marines, and being administered in every respect as though it were a unit of the British navy. With the exception of a dozen acres of vegetable garden, there is not a single green thing on the island—grass, shrub, or tree. The island of Saint Pierre, of which I made mention earlier in this chapter, is bad enough, goodness knows, but it at least has a palm-tree. Ascension hasn't even that. How they get men to go there is altogether beyond my comprehension. If I had to take my choice between being sentenced to exile on Ascension (which Heaven forbid!) or confinement in Sing Sing, I rather think I should choose the prison. There are people on Ascension, nevertheless, the population, which consists of officers, seamen, and marines, together with a handful of cable operators and a score of Kroo boys from Sierra Leone, numbering in all about one hundred and thirty. There were also four women—relatives of the officers—on the island when I was there. They had been there only six months, I was told, yet when our vessel arrived not one of them was on speaking terms with the others. Ascension, is, however, one of the most flourishing “match factories” in the British empire, it being safe to say that any unattached female, no matter what her disqualifications, can get a husband in a week's stay on the island. A young Englishman and his bride boarded our boat at Ascension. She had been born and had spent all of her life on Saint Helena (which is not exactly a roaring metropolis itself), and had married one of the cable operators stationed at Ascension, who was taking her on her first visit to the outside world. She told me that the event of her life, her marriage excepted, had been going out to a vessel to see a motor-car which was being transported to Cape Town. Here was an educated and intelligent English girl who had come to womanhood without ever having seen a railway train, a street-car, a building over two stories high, or a crowd of more than five hundred people.