s flitted from
time to time across the scene, and sometimes one reading man, sometimes
another, came to join us and spend his four hours a day in the
clergyman's tent, but they came for short periods only, and they went
without leaving much trace in my memory, and certainly they played no
important part in what subsequently happened.

The weather favoured us that night, so that by sunset the tents were up,
the boats unloaded, a store of wood collected and chopped into lengths,
and the candle-lanterns hung round ready for lighting on the trees.
Sangree, too, had picked deep mattresses of balsam boughs for the
women's beds, and had cleared little paths of brushwood from their tents
to the central fireplace. All was prepared for bad weather. It was a
cosy supper and a well-cooked one that we sat down to and ate under the
stars, and, according to the clergyman, the only meal fit to eat we had
seen since we left London a week before.

The deep stillness, after that roar of steamers, trains, and tourists,
held something that thrilled, for as we lay round the fire there was no
sound but the faint sighing of the pines and the soft lapping of the
waves along the shore and against the sides of the boat in the lagoon.
The ghostly outline of her white sails was just visible through the
trees, idly rocking to and fro in her calm anchorage, her sheets
flapping gently against the mast. Beyond lay the dim blue shapes of
other islands floating in the night, and from all the great spaces about
us came the murmur of the sea and the soft breathing of great woods. The
odours of the wilderness--smells of wind and earth, of trees and water,
clean, vigorous, and mighty--were the true odours of a virgin world
unspoilt by men, more penetrating and more subtly intoxicating than any
other perfume in the whole world. Oh!--and dangerously strong, too, no
doubt, for some natures!

"Ahhh!" breathed out the clergyman after supper, with an indescribable
gesture of satisfaction and relief. "Here there is freedom, and room for
body and mind to turn in. Here one can work and rest and play. Here one
can be alive and absorb something of the earth-forces that never get
within touching distance in the cities. By George, I shall make a
permanent camp here and come when it is time to die!"

The good man was merely giving vent to his delight at being under
canvas. He said the same thing every year, and he said it often. But it
more or less expressed the super