besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me
sneezing. I should say I had been for years on a low island near
the line, living for the most part solitary among natives. Here
was a fresh experience: even the tongue would be quite strange to
me; and the look of these woods and mountains, and the rare smell
of them, renewed my blood.

The captain blew out the binnacle lamp.

"There!" said he, "there goes a bit of smoke, Mr. Wiltshire, behind
the break of the reef. That's Falesa, where your station is, the
last village to the east; nobody lives to windward - I don't know
why. Take my glass, and you can make the houses out."

I took the glass; and the shores leaped nearer, and I saw the
tangle of the woods and the breach of the surf, and the brown roofs
and the black insides of houses peeped among the trees.

"Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain
continued. "That's your house. Coral built, stands high, verandah
you could walk on three abreast; best station in the South Pacific.
When old Adams saw it, he took and shook me by the hand. 'I've
dropped into a soft thing here,' says he. - 'So you have,' says I,
'and time too!' Poor Johnny! I never saw him again but the once,
and then he had changed his tune - couldn't get on with the
natives, or the whites, or something; and the next time we came
round there he was dead and buried. I took and put up a bit of a
stick to him: 'John Adams, OBIT eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou
and do likewise.' I missed that man. I never could see much harm
in Johnny."