and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement
he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as
a lie. And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead,
and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he
was dead--and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as
possible, which was done. And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the
coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him
up. But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to "suicide
induced by mental aberration"--because, said they, with penetration, "he
said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he
had been in his right mind? No, sir."

CHAPTER LXXVIII.

After half a year's luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took shipping in
a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San Francisco--a voyage in
every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long
weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may
rank as an incident. Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day
they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the
least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack
of better sport. Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be
still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship
had not moved out of her place in all that time. The calm was absolutely
breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle.
For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that
had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her
passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately
acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard
of since. This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely
voyage. We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they
were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the
gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to
trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and
thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling
over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the
enterprise with absorbing interest. We were at sea five Sundays; and
yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that a