he only shrugged his shoulders. The argument brought up
Mr. Stevenson, who said 'What about that for a boat?' nodding at a
certain small deck house. 'It resembles a skiff, and I dare say the
trade-room will spare a pair of paddles.' 'The very thing,' said I,
and began sharpening my sheath knife to cut the lashings. While I got
busy Mrs. Stevenson came to me and I told her what way I was going on
shore. 'Why,' she said, 'if you make your appearance in a miserable
craft of that kind your reputation on Maraki will be gone forever.
Besides they might take you for a Jonah fresh from a whale and turn
you right back to sea again. It would be safer to stay on board and
make another attempt to reach Maraki, this time via Samoa.' I did not
think I was getting quite a square deal, but I stayed. The current had
taken us out of sight of land when a strong and fair breeze sprang up
and carried us by noon next day to our anchorage in Butaritari lagoon.

"Here the party went ashore, biding the vessel getting ready for sea.
In a week we lifted anchor and made for the passage, but the _Equator_
was unwilling to leave. She hung on to a reef, and not until she had
parted with her false keel would she push on and gain the open. During
the first few weeks we had to beat to the eastward, which brought much
calm and rainy weather. Mrs. Stevenson soon found that her berth was
not the driest place in the ship. The tropical sun had warped the
decks so that the rain found its way into the cabins. So Mrs.
Stevenson would emigrate to the galley-way with her couch, and, with
the help of an umbrella ingeniously handled, manage to do fairly well
for a night's rest.

"One calm morning she called to tell us that sharks were around, and
that one of them was wearing the glasses Mr. Osbourne had lost out of
a boat at Maraki. Sure enough there were lots of them, and we soon had
shark and chain hooks over the side, pulling them in and despatching
them quickly and painlessly, but we never caught the one with the
glasses on. Mrs. Stevenson said he could probably see a little better
than the others. Now it seems that all these sharks stirred the
appetite of Mr. Stevenson for shark steak--at least he advocated
making a meal of them. Mrs. Stevenson mildly remonstrated, pointing
out that it would be gruesome to eat the ancestors of Tembinoka, the
man who had sheltered them for weeks. Mr. Stevenson could not see so
far back, so the shark steak came on the table, bu