moan in sweet and weary dream, and I should watch the Speranza lie anchored in the pale atol-lake, year after year, and wonder what she was, and whence, and why she dozed so deep for ever, and after an age of melancholy peace and burdened bliss, I should note that sun and moon had ceased revolving, and hung inert, opening anon a heavy lid to doze and drowse again, and God would sigh ‘Enough,’ and nod, and Being would swoon to sleep:  for that any old Chinaman should be alive in Pekin was a thing so fantastically maniac, as to draw from me at times sudden fits of wild red laughter that left me faint.

During a space of four months, from the 18th June to the 23rd October, I visited the Fijis, where I saw skulls still surrounded with remnants of extraordinary haloes of stiff hair, women clad in girdles made of thongs fixed in a belt, and, in Samoa near, bodies crowned with coronets of nautilus-shell, and traces of turmeric-paint and tattooing, and in one townlet a great assemblage of carcasses, suggesting by their look some festival, or dance:  so that I believe that these people were overthrown without the least fore-knowledge of anything.  The women of the Maoris wore an abundance of green-jade ornaments, and I found a peculiar kind of shell-trumpet, one of which I have now, also a tattooing chisel, and a nicely-carved wooden bowl.  The people of New Caledonia, on the other hand, went, I should think, naked, confining their attention to the hair, and in this resembling the Fijians, for they seemed to wear an artificial hair made of the fur of some creature like a bat, and also they wore wooden masks, and great rings—­for the ear, no doubt—­which must have fallen to the shoulders:  for the earth was in them all, and made them wild, perverse and various like herself.  I went from one to the other without any system whatever, searching for the ideal resting-place, and often thinking that I had found it:  but only wearying of it at the thought that there was a yet deeper and dreamier in the world.  But in this search I received a check, my God, which chilled me to the marrow, and set me flying from these places.

* * * * *

One evening, the 29th November, I dined rather late—­at eight—­sitting, as was my custom in calm weather, cross-legged on the cabin-rug at the port aft corner, a small semicircle of Speranza gold-plate before me, and near above me the red-shaded lamp with green conical reservoir, whose creakings never cease in the stillest mid-sea, and beyond the plates the array of preserved soups, meat-extracts, meats, fruit, sweets, wines, nuts, liqueurs, coffee on the silver spirit-tripod, glasses, cruet, and so on, which it was always my first care to select from the store-room, open, and lay out once for all in the morning on rising.  I was late, seven being my hour:  for on that day I had been engaged in the occasionally necessary, but always deferred, task of overhauling the ship,