consul's safe.

But the end came as the end must come to all human associations.
It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done
in the wild young days, and where we were once more--principally
on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida
Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli
Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
Now Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly heads of
burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the
sharks from making the adjacent waters a hang-out. It was my luck
to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the
thing capsized. There were four woolly heads and myself in it, or
rather, hanging to it. The schooner was a hundred yards away. I
was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly heads began to
scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that
portion of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he
loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.

The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon
the bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the
nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind
funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under
the three it up-ended and rolled sidewise, throwing them back
into the water.

I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner,
expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of
the niggers elected to come with me, and we swam along silently,
side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and