huckster’s round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its people.  Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East.  Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the middle, or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with her mat sails flitting by silently—­and the low land on the other side in sight at daylight.  At noon the three palms of the next place of call, up a sluggish river.  The only white man residing there was a retired young sailor, with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages.  Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call, a deep bay with only a couple of houses on the beach.  And so on, in and out, picking up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles’ steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago of small islands up to a large native town at the end of the beat.  There was a three days’ rest for the old ship before he started her again in inverse order, seeing the same shores from another bearing, hearing the same voices in the same places, back again to the Sofala’s port of registry on the great highway to the East, where he would take up a berth nearly opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days.  Not a very enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise Dare-devil Harry—­Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day.  No.  Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms, who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas, and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands.  Fifty years at sea, and forty out in the East ("a pretty thorough apprenticeship,” he used to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas.  His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts.  Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef?  On that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes.  At that time neither the island nor the reef had any official existence.  Later the officers of her Majesty’s steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship.  Besides, as anyone who cares may see, the “General Directory,” vol. ii. p. 410, begins the description of the “Malotu or Whalley Passage” with the words:  “This advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the ship Condor,” &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to April inclusive.