me."

"Your rebuke is just, dear old simple-hearted fellow; and God forgive
me, if with all my learning, which has brought me no profit, and my
longings, which have brought me no peace, I presume at moments, sinner
that I am, to be more dainty than the Lord Himself. He walked in
Paradise among the trees of the garden, Amyas; and so will we, and
be content with what He sends. Why should we long for the next world,
before we are fit even for this one?"

"And in the meanwhile," said Amyas, "this earth's quite good enough, at
least here in Barbados."

"Do you believe," asked Frank, trying to turn his own thoughts, "in
those tales of the Spaniards, that the Sirens and Tritons are heard
singing in these seas?"

"I can't tell. There's more fish in the water than ever came out of it,
and more wonders in the world, I'll warrant, than we ever dreamt of; but
I was never in these parts before; and in the South Sea, I must say, I
never came across any, though Yeo says he has heard fair music at night
up in the Gulf, far away from land."

"The Spaniards report that at certain seasons choirs of these nymphs
assemble in the sea, and with ravishing music sing their watery loves.
It may be so. For Nature, which has peopled the land with rational
souls, may not have left the sea altogether barren of them; above all,
when we remember that the ocean is as it were the very fount of all
fertility, and its slime (as the most learned hold with Thales of
Miletus) that prima materia out of which all things were one by one
concocted. Therefore, the ancients feigned wisely that Venus, the mother
of all living things, whereby they designed the plastic force of nature,
was born of the sea-foam, and rising from the deep, floated ashore upon
the isles of Greece."

"I don't know what plastic force is; but I wish I had had the luck to be
by when the pretty poppet came up: however, the nearest thing I ever saw
to that was maidens swimming alongside of us when we were in the South
Seas, and would have come aboard, too; but Drake sent them all off again
for a lot of naughty packs, and I verily believe they were no better.
Look at the butterflies, now! Don't you wish you were a boy again, and
not too proud to go catching them in your cap?"

And so the two wandered on together through the glorious tropic woods,
and then returned to the beach to find the sick already grown cheerful,
and many who that morning could not stir from their hammocks, pacing