big house up on the plaza where the bandstand
was, with a fine open-air veranda in front and a glassed-in
conservatory on the side, and aft of the house a garden with a waterfall
modelled after something he had left behind him in Norway. He designed
the waterfall himself, and over the grandpiano in the front room looking
out on the plaza was an oil-painting of it--a whale of a painting, done
by a stranded Scandinavian who told Mr. Amundsen he'd seen that
identical waterfall in Norway many a time, which perhaps he had.

We didn't like Mr. Amundsen any the less because of his collection of
old sagas which he used to spin out for hours on end. Whoppers, some of
them were, but we, his whaling and sealing captains, we'd sit there and
never let on, eating thin Norwegian bread and goats' cheese and dried
chips of ptarmigan, with Trondhjem beer, and none of us but would have
sat longer any time, so that after he got through there was a chance to
hear his daughter Hilda play the grandpiano--and sing, maybe, while she
played. And I tell you, the thought of that fine old Norwegian and Hilda
after months of banging around to the west'ard of Cape Horn in a little
whaling steamer--it was surely like coming home to be home-bound then.

Norwegian songs were they, and I, American-born, and only half
Scandinavian by blood, was probably the one man coming to Amundsen's
who didn't know every word of them by heart. But not much of the
sentiment of them I missed at that, because in other days I'd cruised
off Norway, too, and knew the places the songs told about--the
high-running fjords and the little white lighthouses; the fish drying on
the rocks and the night sun floating just above the edge of the gray
sea; and, again, the long black night of winter and the dead piled up to
wait till they could be buried when the snow went in the spring.

But shore time in Punta 'renas was holiday time. Wet days, hard days at
sea have their time, too; and Mr. Amundsen and Hilda and Punta 'renas
were a long way behind me. I was whaling and sealing in the South
Pacific, and had been doing pretty well, but nothing record-breaking
till one day I picked up a lot of ambergris.

Now I could have stocked a million dollars in a regular way and nobody
pay any great attention; but the tale of that find went through half the
South Pacific. A dozen whaling and sealing masters boarded me in one
month to see if it was so, and after I'd told them the story of it about