harbour, where, the Captain informed us, we must ride. all day and get out with the land breeze, that would probably come down at night. I rushed up in the grey dawn, and bent my gaze upon the shore. I think I must have turned pale, or trembled a little, or done something sensational and appropriate, though no one observed it; whereat I was rather glad, on the whole, for they could not have understood it if I had done my best to explain, which I had not the least idea of doing, however, for it was none of their affair. I knew that place the moment I saw it, the very spot of all I most desired to see; and I resolved, in my secret soul, to go ashore, there and then; amicably if I might, forcibly if I must. The Captain was not over-genial that morning either; he hated detention, and was a trifle nervous about being tied up under the lee of the land for twelve or twenty hours. So he growled if any one approached him all that day, and positively refused to allow the ship's boat to be touched, unless we drifted upon the rocks, broadside,which, he seemed to think, was not entirely out of the question. I was sure there would be a canoe—perhaps several—alongside by sunrise; so I said nothing, but waited in silence, determined to desert when the time came; and the Captain might whistle me back if he could. Presently the time came. We were rocking easily on the swell, directly to the eastward of a deep valley. The sky was ruddy; the air fresh and invigorating, but soft as the gales of Paradise. We were in the tropics. You would have known it with your eyes shut; the whole wonderful atmosphere confessed it. But, with your eyes open, those white birds, sailing like snowflakes through the immaculate blue heavens, with tailfeathers like our pennant; the floating gardens of the sea, through which we had been ruthlessly ploughing for a couple of days back; the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, all were proofs positive of our latitude. What a sunrise it was on that morning! Yet I stood with my back to it, looking west; for there I saw, firstly, the foam on the reef as crimson as bloodfalling over the wine-stained waves; then it changed as the sun ascended, like clouds of golden powder, indescribably magnificent, shaken and scattered upon the silver snow-drifts of the coral reef, dazzling to behold, and continually changing. Beyond it, in the still water, was reflected a long, narrow strip of beach; above it, green pastures and umbrageous groves, with native huts, like great birds'nests, half hidden among them; and the weird, slender, cocoa-palms were there,-those exclamation-points in the poetry of tropic landscape. All this lay slumbering securely between high walls of verdure; while at the upper end, where the valley was like a niche set in the green aad glorious mountains, two waterfalls floated downward like smoke-columns on a heavy morning. Angels and ministers of grace! do you, in your airy perambulations, visit haunts more lovely than this?-as lovely as that undiscovered country from whose bourne the traveller would rather not look back, premising that the traveller were as singularly constituted as I am; which is, peradventure, not probable. They knew it was morning almost as soon as we did, though they lived a few furlongs farther west, and had no notion of the immediate proximity of a strange craft, -by no means rakish in her rig, however; only a simple merchantman, bound for Auckland from San Francisco, but the victim of circumstances, and, in consequence, tied to the bottom of the sea when halfway over. They knew it was morning. I saw them swarming out of their grassy nests, brown, sleek-limbed, and naked. They regarded with amazement our floating home. The news spread, and the groves were suddenly peopled with my dear barbarians, who hate civilization almost as much as I do, and are certainly quite as idolatrous and indolent as I ever aspire to be. I turned my palms outward toward them; I lifted up my voice, and cried, 'Hail, my brothers! We hasten with the morning; we follow after the sun. to you, dwellers in the West!" Nobody heard me. I looked again. upon the shore, wading into the sea. Greetings Down they came nival as they celebrated in the shallow water was a novelty for some of my cabin friends; but I knew all about it. I'd done the same thing often enough myself, when I was young, and free, and innocent, and savage. I knew they were asking themselves a thousand questions as to our sudden appearance in their seas, and would rather like to know who we were, and where we were going, but scorned to ask us. They had once or twice been visited by the same sort of whitish-looking people, and they had found those colourless faces uncivil, and the bleached-out skins by no means to be trusted with those whom they considered their inferiors. They didn't know that it is one of the Thirty-nine Articles of Civilization to bully one's way through the world. Then I prayed that they might be moved to send out a canoe, so that I could debark and go inland for the day. I prayed very earnestly, and out she came,-one of their tiny, fragile canoes, looking like a deserted chrysalis, with the invisible wings of the spiritual, tutelary butterfly wafting it over the waves. In this chyrsalis dug-out sat a tough little body, with a curly head, which I recognized in a minute as belonging to a once friend and comrade in my delightful exile, when I was a successful prodigal, and wasted my substance in the most startling and effectual manner, and enjoyed it a great deal better than if I had kept it in the bank, as they advised me to do. On he came, beating the sea with his broad paddle, alternately by either side of the canoe, and regarding us with a commendable degree of suspicion. I greeted him in his peculiar dialect. The gift of tongues seemed suddenly to have descended upon me, for I found little difficulty in saying everything I wanted to say, in a remarkably brief space of time. "Hail, little friend!" said I; "great love to you. How is it on shore now?" He replied that it was decidedly nice on shore now, and that his love for me was as much as mine for him, and more too, and that consequently he was prepared to conduct me thither, regardless of expense. I went with that lovely boy on shore. The Captain could not resist my persuasive appeals for a short leave of absence, and so I went. Perhaps it would not have been advisable for him to have suppressed me; and he made a courteous virtue of necessity. I had leave to stop till evening, unless I heard a signal gun, upon hearing which I was to return immediately on board, or suffer the consequences. Now, I am free to confess, that the consequences didn't appal me as we swung off from the vessel, where I had been an uneasy prisoner for many days; and I fell to chatting with Niga, my dusky friend, in a sort of desperate joy. Niga was a regular trump. He had more than once piled on horseback behind me, in the sweet days when we used to ride double,-yea, and even treble, if necessary. There was usually a great deal more boy than horse on the premises; hence this questionable economy in our cavalry regulations. Niga told me many things as we drew near the reef: he talked of nearly everybody and everything; but of all that he told me, he said nothing of the one I most longed to hear about. Yet, somehow or other, I could not quite bring myself to ask him, out and out, this question. You know, sometimes it is hard to shape words just as you want them shaped, and the question is never asked in consequence. We were The reef was growling tremendously. drawing nearer to it every moment. I thought the chances were against us; but Niga was self-possessed, and as he had crossed it once that morning, and in the more dangerous direction of the two,—that is, against the grain of the waves,-I concluded there was no special need of my making a scene; and in the next moment we were poised on a terrific cataract of glittering and rushing breakers, snatched up and held trembling in midair, with the canoe half filled with water, and I perfectly blind with spray. |