wind.

So bright and moving was the picture of the breeze-swept sea,
the blue lagoon, the foam-dashed reef, and the rocking trees that
one felt one had surprised some mysterious gala day, some
festival of Nature more than ordinarily glad.

As if to strengthen the idea, now and then above the trees would
burst what seemed a rocket of coloured stars. The stars would
drift away in a flock on the wind and be lost. They were flights of
birds. All-coloured birds peopled the trees below blue, scarlet,
dove-coloured, bright of eye, but voiceless. From the reef you
could see occasionally the seagulls rising here and there in clouds
like small puffs of smoke.

The lagoon, here deep, here shallow, presented, according to its
depth or shallowness, the colours of ultra-marine or sky. The
broadest parts were the palest, because the most shallow; and
here and there, in the shallows, you might see a faint tracery of
coral ribs almost reaching the surface. The island at its broadest
might have been three miles across. There was not a sign of house
or habitation to be seen, and not a sail on the whole of the wide
Pacific.

It was a strange place to be, up here. To find oneself surrounded
by grass and flowers and trees, and all the kindliness of nature,
to feel the breeze blow, to smoke one's pipe, and to remember
that one was in a place uninhabited and unknown. A place to which
no messages were ever carried except by the wind or the sea-
gulls.