ad come home to my own climate, and
looked back with pity on those damp and wintry zones, miscalled the
temperate.

"Two years of this, and comfortable quarters to live in, kind of shake
the grit out of a man," the captain remarked; "can't make out to be
happy anywhere else. A townie of mine was lost down this way, in a
coalship that took fire at sea. He struck the beach somewhere in the
Navigators; and he wrote to me that when he left the place it would be
feet first. He's well off, too, and his father owns some coasting craft
Down East; but Billy prefers the beach, and hot rolls off the
bread-fruit trees."

A voice told me I was on the same track as Billy. But when was this? Our
outward track in the _Norah Creina_ lay well to the northward; and
perhaps it is but the impression of a few pet days which I have
unconsciously spread longer, or perhaps the feeling grew upon me later,
in the run to Honolulu. One thing I am sure: it was before I had ever
seen an island worthy of the name that I must date my loyalty to the
South Seas. The blank sea itself grew desirable under such skies; and
wherever the trade-wind blows I know no better country than a schooner's
deck.

But for the tugging anxiety as to the journey's end, the journey itself
must thus have counted for the best of holidays. My physical wellbeing
was over-proof; effects of sea and sky kept me for ever busy with my
pencil; and I had no lack of intellectual exercise of a different order
in the study of my inconsistent friend, the captain. I call him friend,
here on the threshold; but that is to look well ahead. At first I was
too much horrified by what I considered his barbarities, too much
puzzled by his shifting humours, and too frequently annoyed by his small
vanities, to regard him otherwise than as the cross of my existence. It
was only by degrees, in his rare hours of pleasantness, when he forgot
(and made me forget) the weaknesses to which he was so prone, that he
won me to a kind of unconsenting fondness. Lastly, the faults were all
embraced in a more generous view; I saw them in their place, like
discords in a musical progression; and accepted them and found them
picturesque, as we accept and admire, in the habitable face of nature,
the smoky head of the volcano or the pernicious thicket of the swamp.

He was come of good people Down East, and had the beginnings of a
thorough education. His temper had been ungovernable from the first; and
it is likely