of wives,
Slept in the precinct of the palisade:
Where single, in the wind, under the moon,
Among the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire,
Sole street-lamp and the only sentinel.
To other lands and nights my fancy turned.
To London first, and chiefly to your house,
The many-pillared and the well-beloved.
There yearning fancy lighted; there again
In the upper room I lay and heard far off
The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;
The muffled tramp of the Museum guard
Once more went by me; I beheld again
Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;
Again I longed for the returning morn,
The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,
The consentancous trill of tiny song
That weaves round monumental cornices
A passing charm of beauty: most of all,
For your light foot I wearied, and your knock
That was the glad reveille of my day.
Lo, now, when to your task in the great house
At morning through the portico you pass,
One moment glance where, by the pillared wall,
Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,
Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument
Of faiths forgot and races undivined;
Sit now disconsolate, remembering well
The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,
The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice
Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.
As far as these from their ancestral shrine,
So far, so foreign, your divided friends
Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.

R. L. S.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

_Schooner Equator, at sea, Wednesday, 4th December 1889._

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--We are now about to rise, like whales, from this
long dive, and I make ready a communication which is to go to you by the
first mail from Samoa. How long we shall stay in that group I cannot
forecast; but it will be best still to address at Sydney, where I trust,
when I shall arrive, perhaps in one month from now, more probably in two
or three, to find all news.

_Business._--Will you be likely to have a space in the Magazine for a
serial story, which should be ready, I believe, by April, at latest by
autumn? It is called _The Wrecker_; and in book form will appear as
number 1 of _South Sea Yarns_ by R. L. S. and Lloyd Osbourne. Here is
the table as far as fully conceived, and indeed executed.[33]...

The story is founded on fact, the mystery I really believe to be
insoluble; the purchase of a wreck has never been handled before, no
more has San