ines, and was wrecked on Peru, one of the Gilbert Islands (lately
annexed), losing every dollar that he possessed. He returned to Samoa
and engaged as a "recruiter" in the labour trade. He got badly hurt in
an encounter with some natives, and went to New Zealand to recover.
Then he sailed to New Britain on a trading venture, and fell in with,
and had much to do with, the ill-fated colonising expedition of the
Marquis de Ray in New Ireland. A bad attack of malarial fever, and a
wound in the neck (labour recruiting or even trading among the blacks
of Melanesia seems to have been a much less pleasant business than
residence among the gentle brown folk of the Eastern Pacific) made him
leave and return to the Marshall Islands, where Lailik, the chief whom
he had succoured at sea years before, made him welcome. He left on a
fruitless quest after an imaginary guano island, and from then until
two years ago he has been living on various islands in both the North
and South Pacific, leading what he calls "a wandering and lonely but
not unhappy existence," "Lui," as they call him, being a man both liked
and trusted by the natives from lonely Easter Island to the faraway
Pelews. He is still in the prime of life, and whether he will now remain
within the bounds of civilisation, or whether some day he will return to
his wanderings, as Odysseus is fabled to have done in his old age, I fancy
that he hardly knows himself. But when once the charm of a wild roving
life has got into a man's blood, the trammels of civilisation are irksome
and its atmosphere is hard to breathe. It will be seen from this
all-too-condensed sketch of Mr Becke's career that he knows the Pacific
as few men alive or dead have ever known it. He is one of the rare men
who have led a very wild life, and have the culture and talent
necessary to give some account of it. As a rule, the men who know don't
write, and the men who write don't know.

Every one who has a taste for good stories will feel, I believe, the
force of these. Every one who knows the South Seas, and, I believe,
many who do not, will feel that they have the unmistakable stamp of
truth. And truth to nature is a great merit in a story, not only
because of that thrill of pleasure hard to analyse, but largely made up
of associations, memories, and suggestions that faithfulness of
representation in picture or book gives to the natural man; but because
of the fact that nature is almost infinitely rich, and th