We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days.  I was too well off.  I married, and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a four-shilling lava-lava about his loins.  I could not get him to spend money.  There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that in full measure from all of us.  The children worshipped him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife would surely have been his undoing.

The children!  He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in the world practical.  He began by teaching them to walk.  He sat up with them when they were sick.  One by one, when they were scarcely toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon, and made them into amphibians.  He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them.  In the bush it was the same thing.  At seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed.  At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver, and I have seen strong men balk at that feat.  And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.

“My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen—­they are all Christians; and I do not like Bora Bora Christians,” he said one day, when I, with the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island in one of our schooners—­a special voyage which I had hoped to make a record breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.

I say one of our schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to me.  I struggled long with him to enter into partnership.

“We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down,” he said at last.  “But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law.  I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large.  I drink and eat and smoke in plenty—­it costs much, I know.  I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the money goes.  Fishing on the reef is only a rich man’s pleasure.  It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line.  Yes; it is necessary that we be partners by the law.  I need the money.  I shall get it from the head clerk in the office.”

So the papers were made out and recorded.  A year later I was compelled to complain.

“Charley,” said I, “you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a miserable land-crab.  Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars.  The head clerk has given me this paper.  It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents.”

“Is there any owing me?” he asked anxiously.

“I tell you thousands and thousands,” I answered.

His face brightened, as with an immense relief.