wave, contemptuous, of his hand, “ this, is a gone-before
kind of place ; the pearlers made it, and now it is
done with, same as Thursday Island, where the Jap is
supplanting the white man. You see;” he explains
fraternally, “ they will work for a wage; that you and I-
would turn up our noses at. And now,” he adds inconsequentially,
I am a wrecker. Who knows what
the next turn in the varied kaleidoscope of life will bring
m e ? ”
I suggest good luck, and drink a health to it ; on the
basis of which he gives me a narrative of his adventures
with Thursday Island blacks,» and of many things which
he declares happen in remote- latitudes, but never become
known ; of the men he has killed,' and of the men who
have tried to kill him; of “ Admirality” charts, and the
ways of men upon the seas. He is a good liar, and I
am fain to listen to him, here on the. edge of the pearling
lands and the country of the numberless islands.-
About noon the rakish-looking craft under his command
takes herself off to the salvage of the Amboyna, and
so, for the moment, exit Captain Le Fevre.
C H A P T E R X X V I I I
THE P E A R L IN G TO W N
'T ” '-H ER E is a house,, at Mergui on the hill, built
1 . half a hundred years ago for the comfort of the
European traveller, with a row of convex windows
facing the sea ; and in all Burma there is , no resting-
place more attractive than this. It is high enough to
command a view of great extent and beauty, but not
so high as to cut one off from the sense of human
fellowship. The spectacle it offers changes with every
hour of the day, and as the tide ebbs and flows, as
sunlight and shadow change from east to west, and
storm and calm. succeed each other on the mutable
face of the sea, I, who am its tenant now, know that
chance has made me a spectator from a royal box of
a great play, I awake of a morning to its .splendour,
and the spectacle that greets my half-conscious vision
is one of a pale sapphire sea, of brown housetops and
fishing-boats and tufted palms, suffused in a blue mist
of hanging smoke; all seen through a lace-like tracery
of green boughs and scarlet opulent bloom. My eyes
follow the first gleams of sunshine as they come racing
along thé under-surfa.ce of the leaves, reddening the
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