his march, but the air was too dull with heat for him to
catch so much as a whiff of her refreshing saltness, and for the present
he could not go down to greet her. He was still the lonely troubadour,
dressed in a native cloth around the loins, with a turban of rags upon
his head, and a battered accordion slung from his back, come in from
afar to sing and pull faces for a dinner.

The meal, for reasons which have been stated, was not a success, but
payment had to be rendered all the same. He sang with noise, and made
antics such as experience had taught him would be acceptable; and the
audience, to whom a concert of this kind was a rarity, howled to him to
go on. There was no escape. He had to sing till he could sing no more.
It was far on into the night when a couple of native _tom-tom_ players
rescued him. The musical appetites of the village had been whetted
rather than appeased, and as no more could be got out of this wandering
minstrel, why then they were quite ready to listen to local instruments
and melody.

Dancing commenced, and the heat and the noise grew, and presently Kettle
managed to slip away and walk out through the yam and manioc gardens,
and the banana groves, to the uproarious beach beyond. He threw himself
wearily down on the warm white sand, and when the great rollers swept in
and crashed into noisy bellowing surf, the spindrift from it drove on
him, and refreshed him luxuriously. It was almost worth going through
all he had suffered to enjoy the pleasures of that greeting.

For long-enough he filled his eye on the creaming fringes of the surf,
and then he glanced over it at the purple plain of ocean which lay level
and unruffled beyond. A great African moon glowed above it in the night,
and the lonely vastness of it all gratified him like the presence of a
friend. "You are a decent old puddle," he murmured to himself, "though I
say it that's got precious little from you beyond mud and slashing.
It's good to be back in reach of the stink of you again."

He lay on where he was deep into the night, revelling in the
companionship of the sea, till the many-colored land-crabs began to
regard him as mere jetsam. He was not consciously thinking. He was
letting his mind rest in an easy torpor; but from time to time he let
his eyes range through the purple dark with a seaman's mechanical
watchfulness. The noise of the _tom-toms_ and the dancing from the
village behind him had died away, and nothing but t