the most effectual thing I could have contrived. There was a growl of 'what's that?' from the Chief and he suddenly sprang out in his pyjamas. Seeing only me, he shouted, 'What you making all this row about?' And then he stumbled over old Croasan. I laughed. I couldn't help it. All the while I was explaining to that indignant Chief how we came to be there I was uttering cries of joy in my heart over the rich humanity of it all. It was sordid and silly and wrong, but it was real. The Chief lit his lamp and I saw his one bright eye and the empty, blood-red socket glittering in the radiance. To think that I had been mad enough to feel sick of the _Corydon_! I felt as if I had suddenly got home again. And, just as suddenly, old Croasan had vanished. I looked at the Chief in bewilderment. He eyed me solemnly, but without disfavour, and strode along to our cabin. Throwing the empty bottle through the port-hole, he said briefly, 'Get yourself turned in, Mister,' and went back to his own room. I turned in quick, you can imagine. It had been a great day for me. You may think it strange, but I look back at it as one of the happiest in my life. Work! Work! It is the only thing that keeps us sane when we're young. All else is only bladder--nonsense. Work and the knowledge of it, and the planning of it. Work, and its failures, its bitter anxieties, its gleams of inspiration, its mellow accomplishment, and then the blessed oblivion! "Well, four voyages I made in that old packet, each one worse than the last, I believe--four voyages after nuts, and palm-oil, and enormous square logs of mahogany, and cages of snarling leopards and screaming parrots, and tanks of stealthy serpents. I used to wonder who found it worth while to hire us to bring such bizarre and useless things into England. Once one of the twenty-five hundred weight barrels of palm oil slipped from the slings and fell on the deck with a soft crash. It smashed like an egg, of course. Indeed, as the mess burst and splashed all over everybody on the after-deck, it was not unlike an enormous yolk in its brilliant gamboge colour, with the split and dismembered staves lying radially round it like dirty white of egg. And someone muttered that 'there was twenty quid gone.' The leopards, too, struck me on the homeward trip. Anything less like the traditional wild beast of the jungle you couldn't imagine. Most of them were mangy and had eye-trouble of some sort. They would stare with a sort of rigid horror and indignation at the dancing blue waves over side for hours, their blank, topaz eye-balls never moving unless you poked with a stick, when the brute would utter a cry of what seemed to me utter despair and settle down once more to keep the ocean under observation.