mystery was destroyed. Like all mysteries, it lived only in the hearts
of its worshippers. The hearts changed; the men changed. The once loving
and devoted servants went out armed with fire and iron, and conquering
the fear of their own hearts became a calculating crowd of cold and
exacting masters. The sea of the past was an incomparably beautiful
mistress, with inscrutable face, with cruel and promising eyes. The sea
of to-day is a used-up drudge, wrinkled and defaced by the churned-up
wakes of brutal propellers, robbed of the enslaving charm of its
vastness, stripped of its beauty, of its mystery and of its promise.

Tom Lingard was a master, a lover, a servant of the sea. The sea took
him young, fashioned him body and soul; gave him his fierce aspect, his
loud voice, his fearless eyes, his stupidly guileless heart. Generously
it gave him his absurd faith in himself, his universal love of creation,
his wide indulgence, his contemptuous severity, his straightforward
simplicity of motive and honesty of aim. Having made him what he was,
womanlike, the sea served him humbly and let him bask unharmed in the
sunshine of its terribly uncertain favour. Tom Lingard grew rich on the
sea and by the sea. He loved it with the ardent affection of a lover,
he made light of it with the assurance of perfect mastery, he feared it
with the wise fear of a brave man, and he took liberties with it as a
spoiled child might do with a paternal and good-natured ogre. He was
grateful to it, with the gratitude of an honest heart. His greatest
pride lay in his profound conviction of its faithfulness--in the deep
sense of his unerring knowledge of its treachery.

The little brig Flash was the instrument of Lingard's fortune. They came
north together--both young--out of an Australian port, and after a very
few years there was not a white man in the islands, from Palembang to
Ternate, from Ombawa to Palawan, that did not know Captain Tom and