spittle, and performed all kinds of deviltries over them. But
McAllister lived on. His health was superb. He never caught fever; nor
coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers
and vile skin diseases that attack blacks and whites alike in that
climate never fastened upon him. He must have been so saturated with
alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I used to imagine them
falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders as fast as
they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even
germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.

I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up
with that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had
not died suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the
people were high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head
and feet of the graves, were relics of past sanguinary
history--blubber-spades, rusty old bayonets and cutlasses, copper
bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons, bomb guns, bricks that could have come
from nowhere but a whaler's trying-out furnace, and old brass pieces
of the sixteenth century that verified the traditions of the early
Spanish navigators. Ship after ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not
thirty years before, the whaler BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon
for repair, had been cut off with all hands. In similar fashion had
the crew of the GASKET, a sandalwood trader, perished. There was a big
French bark, the TOULON, becalmed off the atoll, which the islanders
boarded after a sharp tussle and wrecked in the Lipau Passage, the
captain and a handful of sailors escaping in the longboat. Then there
were the Spanish pieces, which told of the loss of one of the early
explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a matter of history, and
is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY. But that there
was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the meantime I