been a boy who ran
about. The skipper finished his whisky, and Neilson pushed the bottle
towards him.

"Help yourself."

The skipper leaned forward and with his great hand seized it.

"And how come you in these parts anyways?" he said.

"Oh, I came out to the islands for my health. My lungs were bad and they
said I hadn't a year to live. You see they were wrong."

"I meant, how come you to settle down right here?"

"I am a sentimentalist."

"Oh!"

Neilson knew that the skipper had not an idea what he meant, and he
looked at him with an ironical twinkle in his dark eyes. Perhaps just
because the skipper was so gross and dull a man the whim seized him to
talk further.

"You were too busy keeping your balance to notice, when you crossed the
bridge, but this spot is generally considered rather pretty."

"It's a cute little house you've got here."

"Ah, that wasn't here when I first came. There was a native hut, with
its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red
flowers; and the croton bushes, their leaves yellow and red and golden,
made a pied fence around it. And then all about were the coconut trees,
as fanciful as women, and as vain. They stood at the water's edge and
spent all day looking at their reflections. I was a young man then--Good
Heavens, it's a quarter of a century ago--and I wanted to enjoy all the
loveliness of the world in the short time allotted to me before I passed
into the darkness. I thought it was the most beautiful spot I had ever
seen. The first time I saw it I had a catch at my heart, and I was
afraid I was going to cry. I wasn't more than twenty-five, and though I
put the best face I could on it, I didn't want to die. And somehow it
seemed to me that the very beauty of this place made it easier for me to
accept my fate. I felt when I came here that all my past life had fallen
away, Stockholm and its University, and then Bonn: it all seemed the
life of somebody else, as though now at last I had achieved the reality
which our doctors of philosophy--I am one myself, you know--had
discussed so much. 'A year,' I cried to myself. 'I have a year. I will
spend it here and then I am content to die.'"

"We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if
we weren't perhaps we should be less wise at fifty."

"Now drink, my friend. Don't let the nonsense I talk interfere with
you."

He waved his thin hand towards the bottle, and the skipper finis