the little child
was with us, and wherever children are there also will the Christmas
spirit come, even though the thermometer registers ninety in the shade,
and at the close of that long summer-hot day we all felt more than
"richer by one mocking Christmas past."

Half-a-Woman was also obliging enough to have a birthday on the trip,
which we celebrated by a dinner in her honour, a very fine dinner
which opened with clear turtle soup and ended with her favourite
ice and a birthday cake of gigantic proportions, decorated with
ornate chocolate roses and tiny incandescent lamps in place of the
conventional age-enumerating candles, cable-ship birthday cakes
being eminently scientific and up-to-date. Other people may have
had birthdays _en route_, for we were away from Manila many weeks,
but none were acknowledged; modesty doubtless constraining those
older than Half-a-Woman from making a too ostentatious display of
tell-tale incandescent lights.

It was a very busy trip, everyone on the ship being occupied, with the
exception of the women who spent most of their time under the cool blue
awning of the quarter-deck, where many a letter was written, and many
a book read aloud and discussed, though more often we accomplished
little, preferring to lie back in our long steamer chairs and watch
the wooded islands with cloud shadows on their shaggy breasts drift
slowly by and fade into the purple distance.

Now we would pass close to some luxuriantly overgrown shore where
tall cocoanut-palms marched in endless procession along the white
beach; now past hills where groups of bamboos swung back and forth
in the warm breeze, and feathery palms and plantains, the sunlight
flickering through their leaves, showed myriad tints of green and gold
and misty gray; these in turn giving place to some volcanic mountain,
bare and desolate. Then for hours there would be no land at all,
only the wonderful horizonless blue of water and sky, the sunlight
on the waves so dazzlingly bright as to hurt the eyes.

But nearly always in this thickly islanded sea there was land, either
on one side or the other, land bearing strange names redolent of tropic
richness, over whose pronunciation we would lazily disagree. Perhaps
it would be but a cliff-bound coast or a group of barren islands
in the distance, bluer even than the skies above them; perhaps some
lofty mountain on whose ridges the white clouds lay like drifted snow;
or perhaps a tier of forest-g