There was a Continental duchess aboard, whom I pitied.  She was oldish and homely, and couldn’t forget her rank.  She had a woman companion, an honorable lady, a maid, and a courier, but she sat all day knitting or reading poor novels.  She had nothing to do with the other passengers, eating with her companion at an aloof table, and sitting before her own cabin, apart from others.  The courier and I talked several times, and once he said that her Highness was much interested in a statement I had made about the origin of the Maori race, but she did not invite me to tell her my opinion directly.  Poor wretch! as Pepys used to say, she was entangled in her own regal web, and sterilized by her Continental caste.

For days and nights we moved through the calm sea, with hardly more than the sparkling crests of the myriad swelling waves to distinguish from a bounded lake these mighty waters that wash the newest and oldest of lands.  It seemed as if all the world was only water and us.  The ship was as steady in her element as a plane in those upper strata of the ether where the winds and clouds no longer have domain.  The company in a week had found themselves, and divided into groups in which each sought protection from boredom, ease of familiar manners, and opportunity to talk or to listen.

Often when all had left the deck I sat alone in the passage before the surgeon’s cabin to drink in the coolness of the dark, and to wonder at the problem of life.  If a man had not his dream, what could life give him?  In his heart he might know by experience that it never could come true, but without it, false as it might be, he was without consolation.

One night, the equator behind, I saw the Southern Cross for the first time on the voyage, its glittering crux, with the alpha and beta Centaur stars, signaling to me that I was beyond the dispensation of the cold and constant north star, and in the realm of warmth and everchanging beauty.

Tahiti, the second Sunday out, was a day off.  I arose Monday with a feeling of buoyancy and expectancy that grew with the morning.  I was as one who looks to find soon in reality the ideal on earth his fancy has created.  The day became older, and the noontide passed.  I had gone forward upon the forecastle head to seize the first sign of land, and was leaning over the cathead, watching the flying-fish leaping in advance of the bow, and the great, shining albacore throwing themselves into the rush of our advance, to be carried along by the mere drive of our bows.

I drew a deep breath of the salt air when there came to me a new and delicious odor.  It seemed to steal from a secret garden under the sea, and I thought of mermaids plucking the blossoms of their coral arbors for the perfuming and adornment of their golden hair.  But sweeter and heavier it floated upon the slight breeze, and I knew it for the famed zephyr that carries to the voyager to Tahiti the scents of the flowers