“I used to give lessons in boxing when I was at Stanford,” was the reply. “Silly!” cries my literal mind. “You are 8:9 A.M. and Greenwich is 8:25 P.M.”!

The children’s studies were under the direction of a poor devil employed at the town-hall, who sharpened his pocket-knife on his boots and was famous for his penmanship. At last, one man, alone in a small canoe, took the letter and started. Waiting for relief, work went on steadily on the Minota. Her water-tanks were emptied, and spars, sails, and ballast started shoreward. There were lively times on board when the Minota rolled one bilge down and then the other, a score of men leaping for life and legs as the trade-boxes, booms, and eighty-pound pigs of iron ballast rushed across from rail to rail and back again. The poor pretty harbour yacht! Her decks and running rigging were a raffle. Down below everything was disrupted. The cabin floor had been torn up to get at the ballast, and rusty bilge-water swashed and splashed. A bushel of limes, in a mess of flour and water, charged about like so many sticky dumplings escaped from a half-cooked stew. In the inner cabin, Nakata kept guard over our rifles and ammunition.

And the poor old Chinaman sat there while I put the tooth back and pulled over. Martin snapped the camera. The deed was done. Elation? Pride? No hunter was ever prouder of his first pronged buck than I was of that three-pronged tooth. I did it! I did it! With my own hands and a pair of forceps I did it, to say nothing of the forgotten memories of the dead man’s skull. CHAPTER VIII THE HOUSE OF THE SUN Fright is the bêche de mer for fear. If a native appears timid and one asks him the cause, he is liable to hear in reply: “Me fright along you too much.” Or the native may be fright along storm, or wild bush, or haunted places. Cross covers every form of anger. A man may be cross at one when he is feeling only petulant; or he may be cross when he is seeking to chop off your head and make a stew out of you. A recruit, after having toiled three years on a plantation, was returned to his own village on Malaita. He was clad in all kinds of gay and sportive garments. On his head was a top-hat. He possessed a trade-box full of calico, beads, porpoise-teeth, and tobacco. Hardly was the anchor down, when the villagers were on board. The recruit looked anxiously for his own relatives, but none was to be seen. One of the natives took the pipe out of his mouth. Another confiscated the strings of beads from around his neck. A third relieved him of his gaudy loin-cloth, and a fourth tried on the top-hat and omitted to return it. Finally, one of them took his trade-box, which represented three years’ toil, and dropped it into a canoe alongside. “That fella belong you?” the captain asked the recruit, referring to the thief. “No belong me,” was the answer. “Then why in Jericho do you let him take the box?” the captain demanded indignantly. Quoth the recruit, “Me speak along him, say bokkis he stop, that fella he cross along me”—which was the recruit’s way of saying that the other man would murder him. God’s wrath, when He sent the Flood, was merely a case of being cross along mankind.