etc., etc., howsoever ‘unfairly followed’ will be likely to ’worm him from his folly’—­if being dead and a ghost is ‘folly.’  Your closing remark is as unkind as it was uncalled for; and if report says true you might have applied it to yourself, sir, with more point and less impropriety. 
                         Very Truly Yours, simon Erickson.

“In the course of a few days, Mr. Greely did what would have saved a world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and misunderstanding, if he had done it sooner.  To wit, he sent an intelligible rescript or translation of his original note, made in a plain hand by his clerk.  Then the mystery cleared, and I saw that his heart had been right, all the time.  I will recite the note in its clarified form: 

[Translation.]
’Potatoes do sometimes make vines; turnips remain passive:  cause
unnecessary to state.  Inform the poor widow her lad’s efforts will
be vain.  But diet, bathing, etc. etc., followed uniformly, will
wean him from his folly—­so fear not. 

          
                                                            Yours, Horace Greeley.’

“But alas, it was too late, gentlemen—­too late.  The criminal delay had done its work—­young Beazely was no more.  His spirit had taken its flight to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires gratified, all ambitions realized.  Poor lad, they laid him to his rest with a turnip in each hand.”

So ended Erickson, and lapsed again into nodding, mumbling, and abstraction.  The company broke up, and left him so....  But they did not say what drove him crazy.  In the momentary confusion, I forgot to ask.

CHAPTER LXXI.

At four o’clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land journey.  This lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island structure higher and higher.  Underneath, it is honey-combed with caves; it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold water—­you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter.  Consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns.

The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now living who witnessed it.  In one place it enclosed and burned down a grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark; the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged, left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf, and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon and wonder at.

There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did.  It is a pity it is so, because such things are so interesting; but so it is.  They probably went away.  They went away early, perhaps.  However, they had their merits; the Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed the sounder judgment.