A mind inclined to casuistry, could it not defend Beachcombing?  Does not the law recognise it under the definition of trover?  Why bother about the law and the moralities when it is all so pleasing, so engrossing, and so fair?

The Beachcomber wants no extensive establishment.  His possessions need never be mortgaged.  The cost of living is measurable by a standard adjustable to individual taste, wants and perceptions.  The expenditure of a little manual labour supplies the omissions of and compensates for the undirected impulses which prevail, and the pursuit—­not the profession—­leads one to ever-varying scenes, to the contemplation of many of the moods of unaffected, unadvertised Nature.  Ashore, one dallies luxuriously with time, free from all the restrictions of streets, every precious moment his very own; afloat in these calm and shallow waters there is a never-ending panorama of entertainment.  Coral gardens—­gardens of the sea nymphs, wherein fancy feigns cool, shy, chaste faces and pliant forms half-revealed among gently swaying robes; a company of porpoise, a herd of dugong; turtle, queer and familiar fish, occasionally the spouting of a great whale, and always the company of swift and graceful birds.  Sometimes the whole expansive ocean is as calm as it can only be in the tropics and bordered by the Barrier Reef—­a shield of shimmering silver from which the islands stand out as turquoise bosses.  Again, it is of cobalt blue, with changing bands of purple and gleaming pink, or of grey blue—­the reflection of a sky pallid and tremulous with excess of light.  Or myriad hosts of microscopic creatures—­the Red Sea owes to the tribe its name—­the multitudinous sea dully incarnadine; or the boat rides buoyantly on the shoulders of Neptune’s white horses, while funnel-shaped water spouts sway this way and that.  Land is always near, and the flotsam and jetsam, do they not supply that smack of excitement—­if not the boisterous hope—­bereft of which life might seem “always afternoon?”

These chronicles are toned from first to last by perceptions which came to the Beachcomber—­perceptions which lead, mayhap, to a subdued and sober estimate of the purpose and bearing of the pilgrimage of life.  Doubts become exalted and glorified, hopes all rapture, when long serene days are spent alone in the contemplation of the splendours of sky and sea, and the enchantment of tropic shores.

TROPICAL INDUSTRIES

Was there not an explicit contract that some of the experiences and events of a settler’s life should be duly described and recorded?  How to fulfil that obligation and at the same time avoid what is ordinarily regarded as the dull and prosaic, the stale, the flat, the unprofitable, is the trouble.  I would gladly shirk even this small responsibility, even as greater ones have been outmanoeuvred, but a written promise unfulfilled may be troublesome to a conscience, which, when reminiscent of ante-beachcombing days, is not altogether unimpressionable.