[Picture: Book cover] ’TWIXT LAND & SEA TALES BY JOSEPH CONRAD A SMILE OF FORTUNE THE SECRET SHARER FREYA OF THE SEVEN ISLES [Picture: Decorative graphic] _Life is a tragic folly_ _Let us laugh and be jolly_ _Away with melancholy_ _Bring me a branch of holly_ _Life is a tragic folly_ A. SYMONS. * * * * * LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. ALDINE HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN · 1920 FIRST EDITION _October_ 1912 REPRINTED _November_ 1912; _January_ 1913; _November_ 1918; _December_ 1920 * * * * * _All rights reserved_ * * * * * TO CAPTAIN C. M. MARRIS LATE MASTER AND OWNER OF THE ARABY MAID: ARCHIPELAGO TRADER IN MEMORY OF THOSE OLD DAYS OF ADVENTURE CONTENTS PAGE A Smile of Fortune 1 The Secret Sharer 99 Freya of the Seven Isles 161 A SMILE OF FORTUNE HARBOUR STORY EVER since the sun rose I had been looking ahead. The ship glided gently in smooth water. After a sixty days’ passage I was anxious to make my landfall, a fertile and beautiful island of the tropics. The more enthusiastic of its inhabitants delight in describing it as the “Pearl of the Ocean.” Well, let us call it the “Pearl.” It’s a good name. A pearl distilling much sweetness upon the world. This is only a way of telling you that first-rate sugar-cane is grown there. All the population of the Pearl lives for it and by it. Sugar is their daily bread, as it were. And I was coming to them for a cargo of sugar in the hope of the crop having been good and of the freights being high. Mr. Burns, my chief mate, made out the land first; and very soon I became entranced by this blue, pinnacled apparition, almost transparent against the light of the sky, a mere emanation, the astral body of an island risen to greet me from afar. It is a rare phenomenon, such a sight of the Pearl at sixty miles off. And I wondered half seriously whether it was a good omen, whether what would meet me in that island would be as luckily exceptional as this beautiful, dreamlike vision so very few seamen have been privileged to behold.