Then we turned to the poor captain, and carried him as gently as we could over the rough ground to the biggest of the banana holes, as the natives call them, and there we were able to dig him a fairly respectable grave.

“Do you know the funeral service, Tom?” I asked.

“No, sar, can’t say as I do, though I seem to have heard it pretty often.”

“Wait a minute.  I’ve got a Bible aboard, I’ll go and get it.”

“I’d rather go with you, sar, if you don’t mind.”

“Why, you’re surely not frightened of the poor fellow here, are you, Tom?”

“Well, sar, I don’t say as I’m exactly that; but somehow he seems kind of lonesome; and, if you don’t mind—­”

So we went off, and were back in a few moments with the Bible, and I read those passages, from Job and the Psalms, immemorially associated with the passage of the dead: 

"Man, that is born of woman, is of few days, and full of trouble.  He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:  He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not—­; and again: 

Behold Thou hast made my days as a hand-breadth:  and mine age is as nothing before Thee:  Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.  Surely every man walketh in a vain show:  surely they are disquieted in vain:  he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.  When Thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, Thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth:  surely every man is vanity.  Have mercy, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry:  hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with Thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were—."

And, by the time we had got to the end, our tears were falling like rain into a brave man’s grave.

CHAPTER X

In Which Tom and I Seriously Start in Treasure Hunting.

Tom and Sailor and I were now, to the best of our belief, alone on the island, and a lonesomer spot it would be hard to imagine, or one touched at certain hours with a fairer beauty—­a beauty wraith-like and, like a sea-shell, haunted with the marvel of the sea.  But we, alas!—­or let me speak for myself—­were sinful, misguided men, to whom the gleam and glitter of God’s making spoke all too seldom, and whose hearts were given to the baser shining of such treasure as that of which I for one still dreamed—­with an obstinacy all the more hardened by the opposition we had encountered, and by the menace of danger the enterprise now held beyond peradventure—­a menace, indeed, to which Tobias’s words had given the form of a precise challenge.  Perhaps but for that, remembering the count of so many dead men—­men who had lost their lives in the prosecution of my probably vain desire—­I would have given the whole thing up, and sailed the boat back to less-haunted regions, which Tom and I might easily have done, and as Tom, I could plainly see, would himself have preferred.