hold in time.

This pool was only one of many along this picturesque and rocky coast,
along which, at the present time, fish are just as plentiful and as easy
to catch; but four years ago I, on visiting 'the' pool of my early days,
found it filled by a pile of soap-stone rocks, detached by the rains
from the sea face of the bluff above it. It was a bitter disappointment
to me, for the memory of that pool had remained with me since my
boyhood, and I felt as one who, after a long, long separation in foreign
climes from some dear friend of his youth, at last returns home, hoping
to meet his comrade once more, and is shown his grass-grown grave.

AN ADVENTURE IN THE NEW HEBRIDES

More than twenty years ago a fine young Polynesian half-caste, named
Alan, and the writer, were running a small trading cutter out of Samoa,
among the low-lying atolls of the Ellice and Tokelau groups, in the
South Pacific. We had hauled her up on the beach to clean and put a few
sheets of copper on her, when, one day, a big, bronze-faced man came
to us, and asked us if we were open to a charter to Santo in the New
Hebrides. After a few minutes' conversation we struck a bargain, the
terms of which were to take him, his native wife, three servants, and
twenty tons of trade goods to his trading station on Espiritu Santo in
the New Hebrides, for six hundred dollars. He was an ex-trading skipper,
but had given up the sea, married a Hervey Island half-caste, and, after
trading some years in the Caroline and Marshall groups, had made a
trip to the New Hebrides, where he had gone into partnership with a
Frenchman, who, like himself, was a sailor man, and had settled down on
Santo. Hannah--for that was his name--had then returned to the Carolines
for his family, and brought them to Samoa, from whence he thought he
could get a passage down to the New Hebrides in one of the two German
brigs then engaged in the Kanaka labour trade--'black-birding,' as it
was called. But one, the _Iserbrook_ had been burnt in Sydney Harbour,
and the other was away at Valparaiso.

But now arose a difficulty. I was not navigator enough to take the
vessel to Santo--a distance of thirteen hundred miles--let alone beat
her back to Samoa against the south-east trades. This, however, Captain
Hannah soon settled. He agreed to navigate us down, and his partner
would come back with me, as his wife, who was a Samoan woman, wanted to
pay a visit to her native country, and our ves