l and made them pliable or sewed muclucs with threads of sinew.
Nam-Bok's eyes roved over the scene, but there was not the charm about
it that his recollection had warranted him to expect. During the years
of his wandering he had looked forward to just this scene, and now that
it had come he was disappointed. It was a bare and meagre life, he
deemed, and not to be compared to the one to which he had become used.
Still, he would open their eyes a bit, and his own eyes sparkled at the
thought.

"Brothers," he began, with the smug complacency of a man about to relate
the big things he has done, "it was late summer of many summers back,
with much such weather as this promises to be, when I went away. You all
remember the day, when the gulls flew low, and the wind blew strong from
the land, and I could not hold my bidarka against it. I tied the
covering of the bidarka about me so that no water could get in, and all
of the night I fought with the storm. And in the morning there was no
land,--only the sea,--and the off-shore wind held me close in its arms
and bore me along. Three such nights whitened into dawn and showed me no
land, and the off-shore wind would not let me go.

"And when the fourth day came, I was as a madman. I could not dip my
paddle for want of food; and my head went round and round, what of the
thirst that was upon me. But the sea was no longer angry, and the soft
south wind was blowing, and as I looked about me I saw a sight that made
me think I was indeed mad."

Nam-Bok paused to pick away a sliver of salmon lodged between his teeth,
and the men and women, with idle hands and heads craned forward, waited.

"It was a canoe, a big canoe. If all the canoes I have ever seen were
made into one canoe, it would not be so large."

There were exclamations of doubt, and Koogah, whose years were many,
shook his head.

"If each bidarka were as a grain of sand," Nam-Bok defiantly continued,
"and if there were as many bidarkas as there be grains of sand in this
beach, still would they not make so big a canoe as this I saw on the
morning of the fourth day. It was a very big canoe, and it was called a
_schooner_. I saw this thing of wonder, this great schooner, coming
after me, and on it I saw men----"

"Hold, O Nam-Bok!" Opee-Kwan broke in. "What manner of men were
they?--big men?"

"Nay, mere men like you and me."

"Did the big canoe come fast?"

"Ay."

"The sides were tall, the men short." Opee-Kwan stat