f a day of reckoning, but I held my peace and forebore
to disquiet my pretty hostess, who was the life and soul of the whole
party aboard, and whose silvery laughter chimed in so sweetly with the
tropic night and the rippling gurgle of water along our keel.

It was past three o'clock when we picked up the Mission light and ran
back to our moorings off the Firm. Then the question arose as to who
would uncage our love-birds and bear the first brunt of Silver Tongue's
explosion. I confess I was very little eager for the job, and felt a
peculiar sinking in the region of my watch pocket as we unlocked the
after-hatch and rolled it softly back, Sasa, with a bull's-eye lantern
penetrating the gloom with a dazzling circle of light. It fell on the
figures of Rosalie and Silver Tongue seated on a settee and locked in
each other's arms. Rosalie was asleep, with her graceful head lying on
Silver Tongue's breast and her long lashes still wet with tears. The
baker, his face crimson with heat and streaked with rivulets of
perspiration, looked up at us grimly through a sort of mist. I waited
for him to spring to his feet and throw himself like a lion on my
shrinking form; but, instead of doing so, he pressed his arms closer
round Rosalie and smiled--yes, by Jove, smiled--and, if you'll take the
word of a retired master mariner, winked, with a peculiar, tender and
calfish expression that in anybody else would have been called skittish.

"How goes it, old man?" I said.

"Gaptain," he returned in the tone of a clarionet tootling a love
passage in grand opera, "me and Rosalie invites you all to the Bublic
Hall Thursday night to dance at our wedding!"

PROFESSOR NO NO

It was years ago that he came to Uvea (said little Nofo, as we sat side
by side on a derelict spar and watched the sun go down into the
lagoon)--years and years and years ago, when I was an unthinking child
and knew naught of men nor their crooked hearts. He was a chief, of wild
and strange appearance, with a black beard half covering his piglike
face; a thin, bent, elderly chief, with hairy hands, and a head on which
there was nothing at all, and teeth so loose in his mouth that at night
he laid them in a cup beside him. He was landed from a ship that
forthwith sailed and was never seen again--he and three tents, and a
boat and innumerable boxes, all numbered from one to a thousand, and a
nigger named Billy Hindoo to care for him and cook.

The Government gave