which I speak uncommonly easy, is round and
rich and musical, possessing a paucity of consonants, being composed
principally of vowels. They love flowers, music, dancing, and games, and
are childishly simple and happy in their amusements, though cruelly
savage in their angers and wars.

I, Adam Strang, know my past, but do not seem to think much about it. I
live in the present. I brood neither over past nor future. I am
careless, improvident, uncautious, happy out of sheer well-being and
overplus of physical energy. Fish, fruits, vegetables, and seaweed--a
full stomach--and I am content. I am high in place with Raa Kook, than
whom none is higher, not even Abba Taak, who is highest over the priest.
No man dare lift hand or weapon to me. I am taboo--sacred as the sacred
canoe-house under the floor of which repose the bones of heaven alone
knows how many previous kings of Raa Kook's line.

I know all about how I happened to be wrecked and be there alone of all
my ship's company--it was a great drowning and a great wind; but I do not
moon over the catastrophe. When I think back at all, rather do I think
far back to my childhood at the skirts of my milk-skinned, flaxen-haired,
buxom English mother. It is a tiny village of a dozen straw-thatched
cottages in which I lived. I hear again blackbirds and thrushes in the
hedges, and see again bluebells spilling out from the oak woods and over
the velvet turf like a creaming of blue water. And most of all I
remember a great, hairy-fetlocked stallion, often led dancing, sidling,
and nickering down the narrow street. I was frightened of the huge beast
and always fled screaming to my mother, clutching her skirts and hiding
in them wherever I might find her.

But enough. The childhood of Adam Strang is not what I set out to write.

I lived for several years on the islands which are nameless to me, and
upon which I am confident I was the first white man. I was married to
Lei-Lei, the king's sister, who was a fraction over six feet and only by
that fraction topped me. I was a splendid figure of a man,
broad-shouldered, deep-chested, well-set-up. Women of any race, as you
shall see, looked on me with a favouring eye. Under my arms,
sun-shielded, my skin was milk-white as my mother's. My eyes were blue.
My moustache, beard and hair were that golden-yellow such as one
sometimes sees in paintings of the northern sea-kings. Ay--I must have
come of that old stock, long-set