d no care for such things; and he would
work hard and make money for them until they married and wanted him no
longer.

And then after a brief stay in the quiet little Australian country
town where his sisters lived, he would again sail out to seek the
ever-fleeting City of Fortune that has always tempted men like him into
the South Seas, never to return to the world of civilisation, but with
an intense, eager desire to leave it again as quickly as possible.
To him the daily round of conventional existence, the visitings, the
theatres, the church-goings, the talkings with well-dressed and highly
cultured men and women, whose thoughts and life seemed to him to be
deadly dull and uninteresting when contrasted with his own exciting
life in the South Seas, palled upon and bored him to the verge of
desperation. From his boyhood--from the time of his father's death he
had moved among rough men--men who held their lives cheaply, but whose
adventurous natures were akin to his own; men "who never had 'listed,"
but who traded and sailed, and fought and died from bullet, or club,
or deadly fever in the murderous Solomons or New Hebrides; men whose
pioneering instinct and unrecorded daring has done so much for their
country's flag and their country's prestige, but whose very names are
forgotten by the time the quick-growing creeper and vine of the hot
tropic jungle has hidden their graves from even the keen eye of the
savage aboriginal. Go through a file of Australian newspapers from the
year 1806 to the year 1900 and you will see how unknown Englishmen have
died, and are dying, in those wild islands, and how as they die, by
club, or spear, or bullet, or fever, how easily the young hot blood of
other men of English race impels them to step into the vacant places.
And it is well that it is so the wild wide world over, else would
Britain be, not the mistress of the seas, but only a sharer of its
sovereignty with France and Germany.

*****

About five years previous to his entering the service of Hillingdon
and McFreeland, Carr had been mate of a trading vessel whose
cruising-grounds were that vast chain of islands known as the Caroline
Group, in the North-West Pacific, and there he had made the acquaintance
of old John Remington and his family, an acquaintance that in the course
of two or three years had deepened into a sincere friendship. The
old trader was a man of means, and owned, in addition to his numerous
trading stations