THE SCHOONER _Fulmar_ lay in a cove on the coast of Banda. Her sails, half hoisted, dripped still from an equatorial shower, but, aloft, were already steaming in the afternoon glare. Dr. Forsythe, captain and owner, lay curled round his teacup on the cabin roof, watching the horizon thoughtfully, with eyes like points of glass set in the puckered bronze of his face. The "Seventh Officer," his only white companion, watched him respectfully. All the Malays were asleep, stretched prone or supine under the forward awning. Only Wing Kat stirred in the smother of his galley below, rattling tin dishes, and repeating, in endless falsetto sing-song, the Hankow ditty which begins,-- "'Yaou-yaou!' remarked the grasshoppers." Ashore, the coolies on the nutmeg plantations had already brought out their mace to dry, and the baskets lay in vermilion patches on the sun-smitten green, like gouts of arterial blood. White vapors round the mountain peaks rose tortuously toward the blue; while seaward, rain still filled the air as with black sand drifting down aslant, through gaps in which we could descry far off a steel-bright strip of fair weather that joined sea and sky, cutting under a fairy island so that it seemed suspended in the air. "That's a pretty bit of land," said the doctor lazily. "'_Jam medio apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos_'. It might be, eh?--Humph!--Virgil and Shakespeare are the only ones who sometimes make poetry endurable. All the others are just little swollen Egos." This was an unusual excursion, and he quickly returned to practical matters. "There's a better anchorage over there," he drawled, waving the milk-tin toward Zacynthos. "And less danger of our being caught than here. But no use; we've got to humor the crew, of course. When they say '_pulo burrantu_,' that settles it. Haunted islands--ghosts--fatal to discipline. I used to have cruises spoiled by that sort of thing. We must stay here and chance being found." He shot a stream of Java sugar into the tea, and, staring at the sleepers, rubbed his shaven head thoughtfully. "Oh, yes, 'superstition,' all very easy to say," he muttered, half to himself. "But who _knows_, eh? Must be something in it, at times."