sited us. She has never had a sick man on
board from that day to the present. But once upon a time three
people spent a very happy night on her deck, as you shall hear.
She is called _The Gleaner_.

I think I was never so much annoyed in my life as on the day when
Annie, my only servant, gave me a month's "warning." That was four
years ago; and she gave up cooking for me to marry a young watchmaker
down at the town--a youth of no mark save for a curious distortion of
the left eyebrow (due to much gazing through a circular glass into
the bowels of watches), a frantic assortment of religious
convictions, a habit of playing the fiddle in hours of ease, and an
absurd name--Tubal Cain Bonaday. I noticed that Annie softened it to
"Tubey."

Of course I tried to dissuade her, but my arguments were those of a
wifeless man, and very weak. She listened to them with much
patience, and went off to buy her wedding-frock. She was a plain
girl, without a scintilla of humour; and had just that sense of an
omelet that is vouchsafed to one woman in a generation.

So she and Tubal Cain were married at the end of the month, and
disappeared on their honeymoon, no one quite knew whither. They went
on the last day of April.

At half-past eight in the evening of May 6th I had just finished my
seventh miserable dinner. My windows were open to the evening, and
the scent of the gorse-bushes below the terrace hung heavily
underneath the verandah and stole into the room where I sat before
the white cloth, in the lamp-light. I had taken a cigarette and was
reaching for the match-box when I chanced to look up, and paused to
marvel at a singular beauty in the atmosphere outside.

It seemed a final atonement of sky and earth in one sheet of vivid
blue. Of form I could see nothing; the heavens, the waters of the
creek below, the woods on the opposite shore were simply
indistinguishable--blotted out in this one colour. If you can recall
certain advertisements of Mr. Reckitt, and can imagine one of these
transparent, with a soft light glowing behind it, you will be as near
as I can help you to guessing the exact colour. And, but for a
solitary star and the red lamp of a steamer lying off the creek's
mouth, this blue covered the whole firmament and face of the earth.

I lit my cigarette and stepped out upon the verandah. In a minute or
so a sound made me return, fetch a cap from the hall, and descend the
terrace softly.

My feet tro