filled their casks at this spring, working every hour of the
twenty-four because the flow was small. Famous harpooners, steersmen
who winked no eye when the wounded whale drew their boat through a
smother of foam, shanghaied gentlemen, sweepings of harbors,
Nantucket deacons, pirates, and the whole breed of sailors and
fighting fellows, congregated here to bathe and to fill their
water-casks. Near this crystal rivulet they slashed each other in
their quarrels over Vait-hua's fairest, and exchanged their
slop-chest luxuries and grog for the favors of the island chiefs.

It was Standard Oil, sending around the world its _tipoti_, or tin
cans, filled with illuminating fluid cheaper than that of the whale,
that ended the days of the ships in Vait-hua, and they sailed away
for the last time, leaving an island so depopulated that its few
remaining people could slip back into the life of the days before the
whites came.

"_Alice Snow_ las' whaleship come Vait-hua six years before," said
the Seventh Man Who Wallows. "Before that, one ship, _California_
name, Captain Andrew Hicks. Charlie, he sailmaker, run away from
Andrew Hicks. One Vait-hua girl look good to him. She hide him in
hills till captain make finish chase him. That him children."

Indeed, most of the faces turned toward me from the group about the
spring were European, either by recent heredity or tribal nature. I
could see the Saxon, the Latin, and the Viking, and one girl was all
Japanese, a reference to which caused her to weep. "Iapona" was to
her pretty ears the meanest word in Vait-hua's vocabulary, and her
playmates held it in reserve for important disagreements.