safer to trust to the sandbank, which they imagined could never be entirely swept by the besoms of the sea.  The cutter fled before the storm, only to capsize in the breakers off the mouth of the Johnstone River.  Clinging to the wreck until it drifted a few miles south, the Kanakas and crew battled through the waves and eventually reached the shore.  Of those who placed their faith on the sandbank not one was spared.  The seas raced over it, pounded and flattened it.  The men upon it were unconsidered trifles.

The tall and handsome Scandinavian whose fortune thus assailed was at his home with his wife and children and brother.  His yacht—­the Maud—­in the height of the storm, began to drag her anchor.  He and his brother went out in a dinghy to secure her.  At dusk the wife, young, petite and pretty, with strained anxiety watched the efforts of the men to beat back to shelter.  Darkness came, blotting out the scene and its climax.  Never after was anything seen or heard of the brothers or the yacht.  And for nearly a fortnight the disconsolate wife and her little ones were alone on the island.

Ten years later, on one of the two bare patches of sand, another beche-de-mer smoke-house was built.  While the owner a swarthy Arabian, was out on the reef miles away, a phenomenally high tide occurred.  His wife—­a comely girl of British descent—­was alone on the shoal.  She watched the rising water apprehensively, until all the sand was covered save the few feet on which the frail shelter stood.  One more ripple and the floor was swamped.  Then, wading and swimming, she managed to reach a punt, and so saved her life.  Since then these patches of sand have not been regarded as a safe outpost even by those most venturesome of people—­beche-de-mer fishers.

This is not an apology, but a confession; not a plea of defence, but a justification—­a fair and free chronicle, a frank acknowledgment of the tributes of impartial Neptune—­Neptune who gives and who takes away—­who stealthily filches with tireless fingers, and who, when in the mood, robs so remorselessly, and with such awful, such majestic violence, that it were impious to whimper.  Who beachcombed my three rudders, the one toilfully adzed out in one piece from the beautiful heart of a bean-tree log, another cunningly fitted with a sliding fin, and that of red cedar with famous brass mountings?  Who owns the pair of ballast tanks once mine?  Who the buoy deemed securely moored?  Who the paddles and the rowlocks and the signal halyards, lost because of Neptune’s whims and violence?  Beachcombing is a nicely adjusted, if not quite an exact art.  Not once but several times has the libertine Neptune scandalously seduced punts and dinghies from the respectable precincts of Brammo Bay, and having philandered with them for a while, cynically abandoned them with a bump on the mainland beach, and only once has he sent a punt in return—­a poor, soiled, tar-besmirched, disorderly waif that was reported to the police and reluctantly claimed.