eate, undecipherable haze, and that is all.

Of one thing, if I am at all to trust my own annals, I was delightedly
conscious. Day after day, in the sun-gilded cabin, the whiskey-dealer's
thermometer stood at 84. Day after day, the air had the same
indescribable liveliness and sweetness, soft and nimble, and cool as
the cheek of health. Day after day the sun flamed; night after night the
moon beaconed, or the stars paraded their lustrous regiment. I was aware
of a spiritual change, or, perhaps, rather a molecular reconstitution.
My bones were sweeter to me. I had come home to my own climate, and
looked back with pity on those damp and wintry zones, miscalled the
temperate.

"Two years of this, and comfortable quarters to live in, kind of shake
the grit out of a man," the captain remarked; "can't make out to be
happy anywhere else. A townie of mine was lost down this way, in a
coalship that took fire at sea. He struck the beach somewhere in the
Navigators; and he wrote to me that when he left the place, it would be
feet first. He's well off, too, and his father owns some coasting
craft Down East; but Billy prefers the beach, and hot rolls off the
bread-fruit trees."

A voice told me I was on the same track as Billy. But when was this? Our
outward track in the Norah Creina lay well to the northward; and perhaps
it is but the impression of a few pet days which I have unconsciously
spread longer, or perhaps the feeling grew upon me later, in the run to
Honolulu. One thing I am sure: it was before I had ever seen an island
worthy of the name that I must date my loyalty to the South Seas. The
blank sea itself grew desirable under such skies; and wherever the
trade-wind blows, I know no better country than a schooner's deck.

But for the tugging anxiety as to the journey's end, the journey itself
must thus have counted for the best of holidays. My physical well-being
was over-proof; effects of sea and sky kept me for ever busy with my
pencil; and I had no lack of intellectual exercise of a different order
in the study of my inconsistent friend, the captain. I call him friend,
here on the threshold; but that is to look well ahead. At first, I
was too much horrified by what I considered his barbarities, too much
puzzled by his shifting humours, and too frequently annoyed by his small
vanities, to regard him otherwise than as the cross of my existence. It
was only by degrees, in his rare hours of pleasantness, when he forgot