“What _do_ you think?” he cried, “while I was talking to the snail just now he offered, of his own accord, to take us all back to England inside his shell. He says he has got to go on a voyage of discovery anyway, to hunt up a new home, now that the Deep Hole is closed. Said it wouldn’t be much out of his way to drop us at Puddleby River, if we cared to come along—Goodness, what a chance! I’d love to go. To examine the floor of the ocean all the way from Brazil to Europe! No man ever did it before. What a glorious trip!—Oh that I had never allowed myself to be made king! Now I must see the chance of a lifetime slip by.” He turned from us and moved down the sands again to the middle beach, gazing wistfully, longingly out at the snail. There was something peculiarly sad and forlorn about him as he stood there on the lonely, moonlit shore, the crown upon his head, his figure showing sharply black against the glittering sea behind. Out of the darkness at my elbow Polynesia rose and quietly moved down to his side. “Now Doctor,” said she in a soft persuasive voice as though she were talking to a wayward child, “you know this king business is not your real work in life. These natives will be able to get along without you—not so well as they do with you of course—but they’ll manage—the same as they did before you came. Nobody can say you haven’t done your duty by them. It was their fault: they made you king. Why not accept the snail’s offer; and just drop everything now, and go? The work you’ll do, the information you’ll carry home, will be of far more value than what you’re doing here.” “Good friend,” said the Doctor turning to her sadly, “I cannot. They would go back to their old unsanitary ways: bad water, uncooked fish, no drainage, enteric fever and the rest.... No. I must think of their health, their welfare. I began life as a people’s doctor: I seem to have come back to it in the end. I cannot desert them. Later perhaps something will turn up. But I cannot leave them now.” “That’s where you’re wrong, Doctor,” said she. “Now is when you should go. Nothing will ‘turn up.’ The longer you stay, the harder it will be to leave—Go now. Go to-night.” “What, steal away without even saying good-bye to them! Why, Polynesia, what a thing to suggest!” “A fat chance they would give you to say good-bye!” snorted Polynesia growing impatient at last. “I tell you, Doctor, if you go back to that palace tonight, for goodbys or anything else, you will stay there. Now—this moment—is the time for you to go.” The truth of the old parrot’s words seemed to be striking home; for the Doctor stood silent a minute, thinking. “But there are the note-books,” he said presently: “I would have to go back to fetch them.” “I have them here, Doctor,” said I, speaking up—“all of them.” Again he pondered. “And Long Arrow’s collection,” he said. “I would have to take that also with me.”