designed to go is one thing, where you shall be able to arrive
another. It was my hope, for instance, to have reached the
Carolines, and returned to the light of day by way of Manila and
the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we were destined to re-
appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of mountains.
Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had
intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary
cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings
upon unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins;
I had learned to welcome shark's flesh for a variety; and a
mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long
lost to sense and dear to aspiration.

The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near
the line; the latter within thirty miles. Both enjoy a superb
ocean climate, days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a
heavenly brightness. Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava,
measuring perhaps (at the widest) a quarter of a mile from beach to
beach. In both, a coarse kind of taro thrives; its culture is a
chief business of the natives, and the consequent mounds and
ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye. In all else they
show the customary features of an atoll: the low horizon, the
expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the
sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and
interest of sea and sky. Life on such islands is in many points
like life on shipboard. The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken
for granted; and the islanders, like the ship's crew, become soon
the centre of attention. The isles are populous, independent,
seats of kinglets, recently civilised, little visited. In the last
decade many changes have crept in; women no longer go unclothed