Everything, even quarantine, comes to an end in time; and so on the morning of the eighth day at anchor, and the thirteenth out from Pam, the sanitary policeman who formed our sole connection with the outside world brought with our morning letters and newspapers the joyful news that our imprisonment was to end at noon that day. Never did convicts hail the hour of their release more gladly than the passengers on board the Ballande liner _St. Louis_. We had managed to make our durance vile tolerable by means of yarning by day, and cribbage by night. In the after saloon, an apartment measuring about sixteen feet by eight, there were four of us—three men and the wife of a mining superintendent in Pam. The miner was one of the good old colonial hard-shell type, a man of vast and varied experience, and the possessor of one of the most luxuriant vocabularies I have ever had reason to admire in the course of many wanderings. One night, I remember, we all woke up wondering whether the ship had broken from her moorings and gone ashore or whether the Kanaka crew had mutinied. It turned out that our shipmate had discovered a rat in his bunk, and was giving his opinion as to the chances of our all dying of plague before the quarantine was over. He knew that there had been fourteen deaths from plague only a month before on the miserable old hooker, and he was considerably scared. When he told us that the rat was alive I began to laugh, whereupon he turned the stream of his eloquence upon me. He literally coruscated with profanity, and the more his adjectives multiplied the louder I laughed, and only the influence of my stable companion, a pearl-sheller and diver from Thursday Island, who had been exploring the ocean floor round New Caledonia, prevented a breach of our harmonious relations. When I got my breath and the miner lost his, I explained that the fact of the rat being alive proved it to be absolutely harmless. It was indeed a guarantee that there was no plague on the ship. If it had been dead and the sanitary authorities had got to know of it, it might have got us another twenty days’ quarantine. Finally, it came out that the rat had bitten the miner’s toe, and, as he believed, inoculated him with the plague. I suggested that whiskey was the best antidote for anything of that sort and so the proceedings terminated amicably. My friend the diver was also a man who could tell you tales of land and sea and under-sea in language which was unhappily sometimes too picturesque to be printable. We had travelled together all the way from Noumea, and made friends before the _St. Antoine_ had left the wharf. We had both been rope-haulers and climbers before the mast, and the freemasonry of the sea made us chums at once. I never travelled with a better shipmate, and if this book ever reaches him across the world I hope that it will remind him of many hours that he made pleasant during that evil time.