t everything in market, bring peacocks and
pheasants and turkeys from America. How you think? Dead? No. She sen'
man to bring on foot on boat. You go visit her, she give champagne
jus' like Papenoo River. She beautiful? My God! I tell you she like
angel. She speak French, English, Russian, German, Italian, anything
the same. She good, but she don't care a dam' what people say. When
she go 'way Europe she give frien's all her thing'. Now she back in
her palace with her baby. She write once say she come back T'ytee
some day by'n'by. She love T'ytee somethin' crazee."

At the Cercle Bougainville Captain William Pincher told me more of
the baroness.

"Is the bloody meat-safe still on the back porch? The baroness made a
voyage with me to the Paumotus just for the air. She sat on deck all
the time, rain or shine. I'd put a' awnin' over 'er in fair weather
or when it rained and there wasn't much wind. She was a bloody good
sailor, too, and ate like us, only she never went below except at
night. I give her my cabin. She'd spen' hours lookin' over the side
in a calm--we had no engine--an' she'd listen to all the yarns."

Lying Bill burst out with one of his choicest oaths.

"She wasn't like some of those ladees I've 'ad aboard. She was a
proper salt-water lass. She loved to 'ear my yarns of the sea. When
she was big with child an' I ashore, I 'ad the 'abit o' droppin' in o'
afternoons and 'avin' a slice of 'am or chicken out o' the safe. Afa
ran 'er bloody show for 'er, an' it cost 'er a bloody fortune. I
used to lie for 'er to 'ear 'er laugh. You know I'm called Lyin'
Bill, but McHenry tells more real lies in a day than I do in a bloody
year. She was the finest-looking girl of the delicate kind I ever saw,
all pink and white an' with fringy clothes an' little feet. Oh! there
was nothing between us but the sea, an' I know that subject."

Lying Bill sighed like a diver just up from the bottom of the lagoon.

"You know that big cocoanut tree in the garden of the Annexe? She
would sit under that with me an' smoke her Cairo cigarettes an'
talk about her bally kiddie. She wanted him to be strong an' to love
the sea, and she thought by talking with me about 'im an' ships an'
the ocean she could sort of train him that way, though he'd been
got in Paris an' might be a girl. Is there anything in that bleedin'
idea? She could quote books all right about it."

Ah, beautiful and brave baroness! I often thought of you during those
mo