Silently the captain handed him a cigar.  “Thank you, sir,” he said, lighted it, and continued reading.

“June 5.  Had a caller to-day.  Climbed the headland this morning.  Found volcano taking a day off.  Looking for sign of Laughing Lass_, noticed something heliographing to me from the waves beyond the reef.  Seemed to be metal.  I guessed a tin can.  Caught in the swirl, it rounded the cape, and I came down to the shore to meet it.  Halfway down the cliff I had a better view.  I saw it was not a tin can.  There was a dark body under it, which the waves were tossing about, and as the metal moved with the body, it glinted in the sun.  Suddenly it was borne in upon me that an arm was doing the signalling, waving to me with a sprightly, even a jocular friendliness.  Then I saw what it really was.  It was Handy Solomon and his steel hook.  He was riding quite high.  Every now and again he would bow and wave.  He grounded gently on the sand beach.  I planted him promptly.  First, however, I removed a bag of tobacco from his pocket.  Poor stuff, and water soaked, but still tobacco.  Spent a quiet afternoon carving a headstone for the dear departed.  Pity it were that virtues so shining should be uncommemorated.  Idle as the speculation is, I wonder who my next visitor will be.  Thrackles, I hope.  Evidently some of them have been playing the part of Pandora.  Spent last night in the cave.  Air quite fresh.

“June 6.  Saw the glow again last night."_

The surgeon paused in his reading.  “That would be the night of the 5th:  the night before we picked her up empty.”

“Yes,” agreed Captain Parkinson.  “That was the night Billy Edwards—­Go on.”

“Saw the glow again last night.  Don’t understand it.  Once should have been enough for them.  This matter of hoarding tobacco may be a sad error.  If Old Spitfire keeps on the way she has to-day I shan’t need much more.  It would be a raw jest to be burned or swallowed up with a month’s supply of unsmoked cigarettes on one.  Cave getting shaky.  Still, I think I’ll stick there.  As between being burned alive and buried alive, I’m for the respectable and time honoured fashion of interment.  Bombardment was mostly to the east to-day, but no telling when it may shift.

“June 7.  This morning I found a body rolling in the surf.  It was the body of a young man, large and strongly built, dressed in the uniform of an ensign of our navy.  Surely a strange visitor to these shores!  There was no mark of identification upon him except a cigarette case graven with an undecipherable monogram in Tiffany’s most illegible style of arrow-headed inscription.  This I buried with him, and staked the grave with a headboard.  An officer and a gentleman, a youth of friendly ways and kindly living, if one may judge by the face of the dead; and he comes by the same end to the same goal as Handy Solomon.  Why not?  And why should one philosophise in a book that will never be read?