with vines! Cheap? You could have bought me for a bad clam. As I thought
of the days we had sweated over those damned cocoanuts, of Triplett's
peril, of the danger to the yawl, while our very families looked on
and laughed, thinking it was a game, and we might have slipped out the
movable lock-gate and simply eased through--well, for the first time
in my married life I was mad. Kippy was all tenderness in an instant.

"Face-of-Moon, no rain," she begged, "Daughter of Pearl and Coral eat
clouds."

She chinned my ear passionately, and I was disarmed in an instant.

I hated to tell Triplett--it seemed to dim his glory, but I needn't
have worried.

"Good business," he exclaimed. "We can get her out inter the open an'
have some sailin' parties. I'd like to catch one of them _wak-waks_."

That was the sort Triplett was. He'd done his trick and there was an
end of it. The next day he had William Henry Thomas busy re-rigging
the Kawa. William Henry Thomas, by the way, insisted on living
on board in happy but unholy wedlock, and Whinney, Swank and I felt
that it was better so. Somehow we considered him the village scandal.

During these peaceful days I wrote a great deal, posting up my diary
as far as we had gone and jotting down a lot of valuable material.
Swank had got his impediments off the boat and began daubing furiously,
landscapes, seascapes, monotypes, ideographs, everything. Most of them
were hideously funny, but he did one thing,--inspired by love, I
suppose--a portrait of his wife that was a hummer. She was a lovely