enter harbour, sound surprisingly like a distant steamer's signal.
And some could name you the vessel when its call, in your duller
ears, sounded no louder than the sigh of the wind through the
branches of the cocoanut palms.

But to-day he who proclaimed the _Pajaro_ gained his honours. Ratona
bent its ear to listen; and soon the deep-tongued blast grew louder
and nearer, and at length Ratona saw above the line of palms on the
low "point" the two black funnels of the fruiter slowly creeping
toward the mouth of the harbour.

You must know that Ratona is an island twenty miles off the south of
a South American republic. It is a port of that republic; and it
sleeps sweetly in a smiling sea, toiling not nor spinning; fed by the
abundant tropics where all things "ripen, cease and fall toward the
grave."

Eight hundred people dream life away in a green-embowered village
that follows the horseshoe curve of its bijou harbour. They are
mostly Spanish and Indian _mestizos_, with a shading of San Domingo
Negroes, a lightening of pure-blood Spanish officials and a slight
leavening of the froth of three or four pioneering white races. No
steamers touch at Ratona save the fruit steamers which take on their
banana inspectors there on their way to the coast. They leave Sunday
newspapers, ice, quinine, bacon, watermelons and vaccine matter at
the island and that is about all the touch Ratona gets with the
world.

The _Pajaro_ paused at the mouth of the harbour, rolling heavily in
the swell that sent the whitecaps racing beyond the smooth water