“She ’s signaling us she wants to send a boat to us.  That’s the first time in thirty years in this line I have ever had such a request from a wind-jammer.  She left her slant to cross our path.”

Half a mile away a beautiful, living creature, all quivering with the restraint, she came up into the eye of the wind, and backed her fore-yard.  A boat put off from her, and we awaited it with indefinable alarm.  It was soon at the gangway we had hastily lowered, unknowing whether woman or child might not be our visitor.  It was a young Russian sailor whose hand had been crushed under a block a fortnight before, and who, without aid for his injury other than the simple remedies that make up the pharmacopoeia of sailing vessels, was like to die from blood-poisoning.  Had our ship not been met, he would undoubtedly have perished, for no other steamer came to these points upon the chart, and, as we were to learn, his own ship did not reach her port for many weeks.  He was a mere boy, his face was drawn with continued pain, but, with the strong repression of emotion characteristic of the sailor, he uttered no sound.  The passengers, relieved from silent fears of any catastrophe aboard the sailing ship, and perhaps salving their souls for fancied failure toward the drowned Leung Kai Chu, crowded to fill the boat with books, fruit, and candy, and to help the unfortunate boy.  When he had been made comfortable by the surgeon, he was overwhelmed with presents.

My vis-a-vis at table, Herr Gluck, a piano manufacturer of Munich, was a follower of Horace Fletcher, the American munching missionary.  Unlike the Swiss, who craved raw food, Herr Gluck ate everything, but each mouthful only after thorough maceration, salivation, and slow deglutition.  At breakfast he absorbed a glass of milk and a piece of toast, but took longer than I did to bolt melon, bacon and eggs, toast, coffee, and marmalade.  He sold the pianos his family had made for a hundred years, and munched all about the world.  He professed rugged health, and never tired of dancing; but he looked drawn and melancholy, and had naught of the rugged masculinity of the bolters.  Once or twice he drank in my company a cocktail, and he munched each sip as if it were mutton.  He would occupy the entire dinner-time with one baked potato.  I was endeared to him because I had known his master, Fletcher, and with him, too, had chewed a glass of wine in the patio of the Army and Navy Club in Manila.  I longed to pit the Swiss and Herr Gluck in argument, but in sober thought had to give the laurel to the latter, because, in case of stress, one might, with his system, live on a trifle, while raw, nourishing food might be difficult to get in quantity.

Most of the passengers were Australians and New-Zealanders returning home, and only a few were bound for Tahiti—­the Tahitian women, the Swiss, Hallman and his son, and M. Leboucher, a young merchant, born there, of a Spanish mother.  William McBirney of County Antrim, but long in Raratonga, an island two days’ steaming from Tahiti, was going back to his adopted home.