n throng
which had flocked down to quay and beach and promenade to see us go. He
stood alone, that marvelous man, holding the last bottle of Malvasia
sweetly cradled in an arm, and he harangued the multitude. He gave a
dissertation upon Madeira, I believe, its men, manners, and morals. What
he said is lost to fame, though doubtless it was pithy and pointed. But
I remember his climax, and that was nothing short of inspired. He flung
abroad a magnificent gesture.

"_Va-se'mbora_!" thundered Angus Jones in the face of the populace.
"_Va-se'mbora!_"--Which means in the vernacular: Chase yourself!...

THE WICKS OF MACASSAR

A naturalist, by what Andrew Harben told me, is a man that goes around
looking for things that happen by nature. The more natural they are the
better pleased is he. And some day if he looks far enough he's liable to
fetch up against something that just naturally makes a meal off him and
he goes looking no farther.

Anyway this is what I gathered from Andrew Harben. He's all right now
and when last I saw him he was pounding chain cables by the Cape Town
breakwater--such being the most denatured employment he could find.
But he used to be a naturalist himself and interested in most curious
facts like bugs and poison plants and wild animals, until once they
brought him so close to an unnatural finish that they cured him for all
time to come....

"Keep away from it," says Andrew Harben, giving me advice while he
chipped the rust flakes lovingly into my eyes. "Whenever you have a
feeling that you'd like to be a great scientific investigator and
discover what's none of your business," he says, "go and pry into a keg
of dynamite with a chisel. It's quicker and more homelike. But leave the
strange places and the strange secrets of the earth to university
professors and magazine writers, they being poor devils and mostly so
scrawny that nothing would bite them anyway. You mightn't believe I once
went around sampling rocks and fleabites and tribal customs and things
in all kinds of queer corners. I did, 'he says,' but I do not any more.
And yet I made one remarkable scientific discovery before I quit. It is
a valuable fact in nature and I will hand it to you for what it's worth,
free gratis."

Which he did, and I'm doing the same.

It was while his ambition was young and strong that Andrew Harben took a
job from the Batavia Government to watch a screw-pile light by the
Borneo shore of Macassar. His