f that name, and that he owned a little
cutter which traded to Raiaroa, on which atoll he lived. I walked
like him, was of the same size, and had the "same kin' funny face."

She piqued my curiosity, and so when I found him at the round table
of the Polonsky-Llewellyn group at the Cercle Bougainville, I looked
him over narrowly. His name was Dixon,--Lovaina never got a name
right,--an Englishman, a wanderer, with an Eton schooling, short,
solidly built, with a bluff jaw and a keen, blue eye. He was not
good-looking. He had learned the nickname given me, and was in such
a happy frame of mind that he ordered drinks for the club.

"I'm lucky to be here at all," he said seriously. "I have a seven-ton
cutter, and left the Paumotus four days ago for Papeete. We had
eight tons of copra in the hold, filling it up within a foot of the
hatch. Eight miles off Point Venus the night before last, at eleven
o'clock, we hoped for a bit of wind to reach port by morning. It
was calm, and we were all asleep but the man at the wheel, when
a waterspout came right out of the clear sky,--so the steersman
said,--and struck us hard. We were swamped in a minute. The water
fell on us like your Niagara. Christ! We gave up for gone, all of us,
the other five all kanakas. We heeled over until the deck was under
water,--of course we've got no freeboard at all,--and suddenly a gale
sprung up. We pulled in the canvas, but to no purpose. Under a bare
pole we seemed every minute to be going under completely. We have
no cabin, and all we could do was to lay flat on the deck in the
water, and hold on to anything we could grab. The natives prayed,
by God! They 're Catholics, and they remembered it then. The mate
wanted to throw the copra overboard. I was willing, but I said,
'What for? We're dead men, and it'll do no good. She can't stand up
even empty.' We stayed swamped that way all night, expecting to be
drowned any minute, and I myself said to the Lord--I was a chorister
once--that if I had done anything wrong in my life, I was sorry--"

"But you knew you had?" I interposed.

"Of course I did, but I wasn't going to rub it in on myself in
that fix. I knew He knew all about me. My father was a curate in
Devon. Well, we pulled through all right, because here I am, and the
copra's on the dock. What do you think--the wind died away completely,
and we had to sweep in to Papeete."

I touched his glass with mine. He was very ingenuous, a four-square
man.