Of one thing, if I am at all to trust my own annals, I was delightedly conscious.  Day after day, in the sun-gilded cabin, the whiskey-dealer’s thermometer stood at 84.  Day after day, the air had the same indescribable liveliness and sweetness, soft and nimble, and cool as the cheek of health.  Day after day the sun flamed; night after night the moon beaconed, or the stars paraded their lustrous regiment.  I was aware of a spiritual change, or, perhaps, rather a molecular reconstitution.  My bones were sweeter to me.  I had come home to my own climate, and looked back with pity on those damp and wintry zones, miscalled the temperate.

“Two years of this, and comfortable quarters to live in, kind of shake the grit out of a man,” the captain remarked; “can’t make out to be happy anywhere else.  A townie of mine was lost down this way, in a coalship that took fire at sea.  He struck the beach somewhere in the Navigators; and he wrote to me that when he left the place, it would be feet first.  He’s well off, too, and his father owns some coasting craft Down East; but Billy prefers the beach, and hot rolls off the bread-fruit trees.”

A voice told me I was on the same track as Billy.  But when was this?  Our outward track in the Norah Creina lay well to the northward; and perhaps it is but the impression of a few pet days which I have unconsciously spread longer, or perhaps the feeling grew upon me later, in the run to Honolulu.  One thing I am sure:  it was before I had ever seen an island worthy of the name that I must date my loyalty to the South Seas.  The blank sea itself grew desirable under such skies; and wherever the trade-wind blows, I know no better country than a schooner’s deck.

But for the tugging anxiety as to the journey’s end, the journey itself must thus have counted for the best of holidays.  My physical well-being was over-proof; effects of sea and sky kept me for ever busy with my pencil; and I had no lack of intellectual exercise of a different order in the study of my inconsistent friend, the captain.  I call him friend, here on the threshold; but that is to look well ahead.  At first, I was too much horrified by what I considered his barbarities, too much puzzled by his shifting humours, and too frequently annoyed by his small vanities, to regard him otherwise than as the cross of my existence.  It was only by degrees, in his rare hours of pleasantness, when he forgot (and made me forget) the weaknesses to which he was so prone, that he won me to a kind of unconsenting fondness.  Lastly, the faults were all embraced in a more generous view:  I saw them in their place, like discords in a musical progression; and accepted them and found them picturesque, as we accept and admire, in the habitable face of nature, the smoky head of the volcano or the pernicious thicket of the swamp.