manage to live quite as healthily as before, and with obvious advantage
to health and teeth. Two there were, however, namely, Quintal and
McCoy, who would not give in, but vowed with their usual violence of
language that they would smoke seaweed rather than want their pipes.
Like most men of powerful tongue and weak will, they did not fulfil
their vows. Seaweed was left to the gulls, but they tried almost every
leaf and flower on the island without success. Then they scraped and
dried various kinds of bark, and smoked that. Then they tried the
fibrous husk of the cocoa-nut, and then the dried and pounded kernel,
but all in vain. Smoke, indeed, they produced in huge volumes, but of
satisfaction they had none. It was a sad case.

"If we could only taste the flavour o' baccy ever so mild," they were
wont to say to their comrades, "the craving would be satisfied."

To which Isaac Martin, who had no mercy on them, would reply, "If ye
hadn't created the cravin' boys, ye wouldn't have bin growlin' and
hankerin' after satisfaction."

As we have said, McCoy was smoking, perhaps we should say agonising,
over his evening pipe. His man, or slave, Timoa, was seated on the
opposite side of the hut, playing an accompaniment on the flute to
McCoy's wife and two other native women, who were singing. The flute
was one of those rough-and-ready yellow things, like the leg of a chair,
which might serve equally well as a policeman's baton or a musical
instrument. It had been given by one of the sailors to Timoa, who
developed a wonderful capacity for drawing unmusical sounds out of it.
The singing was now low and plaintive, anon loud and harsh--always wild,
like the song of the savages. The two combined assisted the pipe in
soothing William McCoy--at least so we may assume, because he had
commanded the music, and lay in his bunk in the attitude of one enjoying
it. He sometimes even added to the harmony by uttering a bass growl at
the pipe.

During a brief pause in the accompaniment Timoa became aware of a low
hiss outside, as if of a serpent. With glistening eyes and head turned
to one side he listened intently. The hiss was repeated, and Timoa
became aware that one of his kinsmen wished to speak with him in secret.
He did not dare, however, to move.

McCoy was so much taken up with his pipe that he failed to notice the
hiss, but he observed the stoppage of the flute's wail.

"Why don't you go on, you brute!" he cried, ang