, compensating for the floral
scantiness. The doctor sang "O, Ca'line," and the captain did tricks
with the napkins. Everybody voted this Thanksgiving a success.

The weary days that followed at Aloran were relieved late in December
by a visit from the doctor, and a new constabulary officer named
Johnson, [1] who had ridden out on muddy roads, through swimming
rice-pads, across swollen rivers. When the store of commissaries was
exhausted, we rode back, and Johnson came to grief by falling through
an open bridge into a rice-swamp, so that all that we could see of
him was a square inch of his poor horse's nose. We pulled him out,
and named the place "Johnson's Despair."

Our Christmas Eve was an eventful one. The transport _Trenton_ went to
pieces on our coral reef. We were expecting company, and when the boat
pulled in, we went down to the beach to tell them where the landing
was. "We thought that you were trying to tell us we were on a rock,"
the little cavalry lieutenant, who had been at work all night upon the
pumps, said, when we saw him in the morning. It was like a shipwreck
in a comic opera, so easily the vessel grounded; and at noon the next
day we were invited out on shipboard for a farewell luncheon. The
boat was listed dangerously to port, and, as the waves rolled in,
kept bumping heavily upon the coral floor. The hull under the engines
was staved in, and, as the tide increased, the vessel twisted as
though flexible. Broken amidships, finally, she twisted like some
tortured creature of the deep. The masts and smokestacks branched
off at divergent angles, giving the ship a rather drunken aspect. At
high tide the masts and deck-house were swept off; the bow went, and
the boat collapsed and bent. By evening nothing was left except the
bowsprit rocking defiantly among the breakers, a broken skeleton, the
keel and ribs, and the big boiler tumbling and squirting in the surf.

There were three shipwrecked mariners to care for,--the bluff captain,
one of nature's noblemen, who had spent his life before the mast and
on the bridge, and who had been tossed upon many a strange and hostile
coast. He had a deep scar on his head, received when he was shanghaied
twenty years before. He told strange stories of barbaric women dressed
in sea-shells; of the Pitcairn islanders, who formerly wore clothes
of papyrus, but now dressed in the latest English fashion, trading
the native fruits and melons for the merchandise of passing