to suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for that it was the work of his own hands entirely.  Yet the jury brought in the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death “by the hands of some person or persons unknown!” They explained that the perfectly undeviating consistency of Markiss’s character for thirty years towered aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as a lie.  And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead, and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he was dead—­and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as possible, which was done.  And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him up.  But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to “suicide induced by mental aberration”—­because, said they, with penetration, “he said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he had been in his right mind?  No, sir.”

CHAPTER LXXVIII.

After half a year’s luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took shipping in a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San Francisco—­a voyage in every way delightful, but without an incident:  unless lying two long weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may rank as an incident.  Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack of better sport.  Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship had not moved out of her place in all that time.  The calm was absolutely breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle.  For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard of since.  This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely voyage.  We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the enterprise with absorbing interest.  We were at sea five Sundays; and yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the other days were Sundays too.

I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment.  I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me!  I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation.  I showed it to several friends, but they all shook their heads.  They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a humiliating failure of it.