An answer must be sent at once.  Her husband telegraphed that they would come, but it was not without misgivings that he made this final decision.  There was much at stake in an uncertain venture of the kind.  It meant a sacrifice of comfort for his wife and mother, big expense, and perhaps no better health in the end.

However, it seemed worth the risk, and having decided to go he began to look forward to the trip with boyish delight.  “It will be horrid fun,” he said, “to be an invalid gentleman on board a yacht, to walk around with a spy-glass under your arm, to make landings and trade beads and chromos for cocoanuts, and to have the natives swim out to meet you.”

He and Lloyd spent hours laying their course and making out lists of stores with which to furnish the schooner, regardless of the doubt expressed by their friends as to the capacity of the boat.  “They calmly proceeded with their interminable lists and scorned the criticism of a mere land-lubber.  All conversation that was not of a nautical character failed to hold their interest.”

Cheered with strong hopes for Louis’s future, the family departed for San Francisco on the 28th of May, 1888.  Their one regret was the good friends they were leaving behind.  This particularly affected Louis, but he tried to hide his feelings by making all sorts of lively and impossible proposals for their joining him later on.

His parting words to Mr. Low were:  “There’s England over there—­and I’ve left it—­perhaps I may never go back—­and there on the other side of this big continent there’s another sea rolling in.  I loved the Pacific in the days when I was at Monterey, and perhaps now it will love me a little.  I am going to meet it; ever since I was a boy the South Seas have laid a spell upon me.”

CHAPTER VIII

IN THE SOUTH SEAS

 “Since long ago, a child at home,
  I read and longed to rise and roam,
  Where’er I went, what’er I willed,
  One promised land my fancy filled. 
  Hence the long road my home I made;
  Tossed much in ships; have often laid
  Below the uncurtained sky my head,
  Rain-deluged and wind buffeted;
  And many a thousand miles I crossed,
  And corners turned—­love’s labor lost,
  Till, Lady, to your isle of sun
  I came, not hoping, and like one
  Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes,
  And hailed my promised land with cries.”

Once, while Louis was a discontented student at the University of Edinburgh, the premier of New Zealand, Mr. Seed, spent an evening with his father and talked about the South Sea Islands until the boy said he was “sick with desire to go there.”

From that time on a visit to that out-of-the-way corner of the earth was a cherished dream, and he read everything he could lay hands on that told about it.

While in California, the first time, Mr. Virgil Williams, an artist, aroused his interest still more by the accounts of his own trip in the South Seas.