learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days
in fairyland; and I decided to remain. I began to prepare these
pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer Janet
Nicoll. If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I
have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of
my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future
house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts
of the sea.

That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's
hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the
islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm
shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps
cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely
made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part
of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and
the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some
sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and
ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and
language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and
habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.

The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the
first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and
touched a virginity of sense. On the 28th of July 1888 the moon
was an hour down by four in the morning. In the east a radiating
centre of brightness told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline,
the morning bank was already building, black as ink. We have all
read of the swiftness of the day's coming and departure in low
latitudes; it is a point on which the scientific and sentimental