“That must mean me, Bickley the doctor and Bastin the clergyman,” I said, laughing.

Jacobsen paid no attention, for he was reading what followed.  As he did so I saw his face turn white and his eyes begin to start from his head.  Then suddenly he tore the paper in pieces which he thrust into his pocket.  Lifting his great fist he uttered some Danish oath and with a single blow smashed the planchette to fragments, after which he strode away, leaving me astonished and somewhat disturbed.  When I met him the next morning I asked him what was on the paper.

“Oh!” he said quietly, “something I should not like you too-proper English gentlemens to see.  Something not nice.  You understand.  Those spirits not always good; they do that kind of thing sometimes.  That’s why I broke up this planchette.”

Then he began to talk of something else and there the matter ended.

I should have said that, principally with a view to putting themselves in a position to confute each other, ever since we had started from Marseilles both Bastin and Bickley spent a number of hours each day in assiduous study of the language of the South Sea Islands.  It became a kind of competition between them as to which could learn the most.  Now Bastin, although simple and even stupid in some ways, was a good scholar, and as I knew at college, had quite a faculty for acquiring languages in which he had taken high marks at examinations.  Bickley, too, was an extraordinarily able person with an excellent memory, especially when he was on his mettle.  The result was that before we ever reached a South Sea island they had a good working knowledge of the local tongues.

As it chanced, too, at Perth we picked up a Samoan and his wife who, under some of the “white Australia” regulations, were not allowed to remain in the country and offered to work as servants in return for a passage to Apia where we proposed to call some time or other.  With these people Bastin and Bickley talked all day long till really they became fairly proficient in their soft and beautiful dialect.  They wished me to learn also, but I said that with two such excellent interpreters and the natives while they remained with us, it seemed quite unnecessary.  Still, I picked up a good deal in a quiet way, as much as they did perhaps.

At length, travelling on and on as a voyager to the planet Mars might do, we sighted the low shores of Australia and that same evening were towed, for our coal was quite exhausted, to the wharf at Fremantle.  Here we spent a few days exploring the beautiful town of Perth and its neighbourhood where it was very hot just then, and eating peaches and grapes till we made ourselves ill, as a visitor often does who is unaware that fruit should not be taken in quantity in Australia while the sun is high.  Then we departed for Melbourne almost before our arrival was generally known, since I did not wish to advertise our presence or the object of our journey.