The Kanaka was squatting with crossed legs on the sand, screwing his eyes into the sun to watch the graceful flight of a gull. He was wearing all that remained of just two garments――a shirt, the sleeves of which he had removed by main force, and a pair of cotton trousers rolled above his knees. Back on one of his beloved islands, where there was no coal to shovel into greedy furnaces and where time was a word that had almost ceased to have any meaning, he was fast reverting to nature. He looked like a person whose highest ambition would be to lie on his back and bask in the sunshine for ever and ever. As the gull seemed to disappear in the burning sun Jim turned round slowly with a lazy smile. “More than all the other things in the world, um?” he repeated, looking at Tempest, who nodded. “One time,” Jim said with quaint gravity, “I sailed on a big ship round Cape Horn to a place where all the ships come from, bigger’n Manila, bigger’n Iquique, called Hobroken.” “Hobroken?” Tempest queried, wrinkling his brows in perplexity. “Where in the name of fortune is that?” “Great big place,” declared Jim, extending his arms wide as though to indicate the size. “Hobroken up a river.” “You don’t happen to mean Hoboken, by any chance, do you, Jim?” Dave asked. “Hobroken――dat’s um, Hobroken,” the Kanaka said, hugely pleased. Dave rolled backward and roared with laughter. “That’s almost a part of a place called New York City, Jim,” he said at last. “Didn’t you ever hear of New York?” The Kanaka nodded, but looked puzzled. He saw no cause for mirth. “New York somewhere near there,” he said. “Well, what about Hoboken, Jim?” Tempest asked. “One time I’d lika go to Hobroken again,” was the reply, uttered impressively, “with two three dollars.” “Funny thing,” said Tempest, blowing rings of smoke; “you’re not the first person I’ve heard express the desire to go to New York with dollars, but ‘two three’ wouldn’t carry you very far there, Jim.” The Kanaka, who had worked wonders on that sum in Manila, was coldly incredulous. “What would you do when you got there?” Dave asked. Again Jim smiled happily. The prospect was evidently one which he had treasured in his moments of leisure while basking on various islands in the South Seas. “Wear clothes like um other peoples,” he said, “and ride in um trolley-cars.” “And stop there always?” Tempest suggested. The Kanaka shook his head slowly, now watching another gull skim the water. “Just for a bit while,” he said, “then p’raps come back here or some other place.” “He’s got the New York fever,” Tempest laughed, “but it is the most comical case I ever heard of. I expect New York would soon cure him, especially when his two three dollars were gone, and then he’d begin to pine for something really exciting again, like the fight he had with that twelve-pound fish yesterday.”