The breeze held on while games of the formal tournaments progressed, and prizes were won by the young and the spry.

One night I came on deck when the moon had risen an hour, and saw as strange and beautiful a sight as ever made me sigh for the lack of numbers in my soul.  A huge, long, black cloud hung pendent from midway in the sky, with its lower part resting on the sea.  It was for all the world of marvels like a great dragon, shaped rudely to a semblance of the beast of the Apocalypse, and with its head lifted into the ether, so that it was framed against the heavens.  The moon was in its mouth; the moon shaped like an eye, a brilliant, glowing, wondrous orb, more intensely golden for its contrast with the ominous blackness of the serpentine cloud.  I felt that I had found the origin of the Oriental fable.  Some minutes the illusion held, and then the cloud lowered, and the moon, alone against a pale-blue background, the horizon a mass of scudding draperies of pearly hue, lit the ocean between the ship and the edge of the world in a tremulous and mellow gilded path.

There was dancing on the boat-deck, the Lydian measures of the Hawaiian love-songs, those passionate melodies in which Polynesian pearls have been strung on European filaments, filling the balmy air with quivering notes of desire, and causing dancers to hold closer their partners.  The Occident seemed very far away; even older people felt the charm of clime that had come upon them, and laughter rang as stories ran about the group in the reclining-chairs.

The captain, though grim from a gripping religion that had squeezed all joy from his scripture-haunted soul, added an anecdote to the entertainment.

“Passing from Fiji to Samoa,” he said, “I had to leave the mail at Niuafou, in the Tongan Islands.  It is a tiny isle, three miles long by as wide, an old crater in which is a lagoon, hot springs, and every sign of the devastation of many eruptions.  The mail for Niuafou was often only a single letter and a few newspapers.  We sealed them in a tin can, and when we met the postmaster at sea, we threw it over.  He would be three miles out, swimming, with a small log under arm for support, and often he might be in company with thirty or forty of his tribe, who, with only the same slight aids to keeping afloat, would be fishing leisurely.  They carried their tackle and their catch upon their shoulders, and appeared quite at ease, with no concern for their long swim to shore or for the sharks, which were plentiful.  They might even nap a little during the middle afternoon.”

“When our people wanted to sleep at sea,” said McBirney, “if there were two of them, though we never bothered to take along logs, one rested on the other’s shoulder.”

One listened and marveled, and smiled to think that, had one stayed at home, one might never know these things.  Forgotten was the wraith of Leung Kai Chu, the jungle trail of Hallman, and even the trepidation with which we had awaited the sailing ship’s boat.  I was soon to be in those enchanted archipelagoes, and to see for myself those mighty swimmers and those sleepers upon the sea.  I might even get a letter through that floating postmaster.