ngs to you, McHenry, in Tahiti, from Your Dog. It is hard to
live without you. It is long since I have seen you. It is hard. I go
to join my father. I give myself to the _mako_. To you, McHenry, from
Your Dog, greetings and farewell."

Across the bottom of the letter was written in English: "The kid
disappeared from the leper settlement. They think he drowned himself."

CHAPTER III

Thirty-seven days at sea; life of the sea-birds; strange
phosphorescence; first sight of Fatu-hiva; history of the islands;
chant of the Raiateans.

Thirty-seven days at sea brought us to the eve of our landing in
Hiva-oa in the Marquesas. Thirty-seven monotonous days, varied only
by rain-squalls and sun, by calm or threatening seas, by the
changing sky. Rarely a passing schooner lifted its sail above the
far circle of the horizon. It was as though we journeyed through
space to another world.

Yet all around us there was life--life in a thousand varying forms,
filling the sea and the air. On calm mornings the swelling waves
were splashed by myriads of leaping fish, the sky was the playground
of innumerable birds, soaring, diving, following their accustomed
ways through their own strange world oblivious of the human
creatures imprisoned on a bit of wood below them. Surrounded by a
universe filled with pulsing, sentient life clothed in such
multitudinous forms, man learns humility. He shrinks to a speck on
an illimitable ocean.

I spent long afternoons lying on the cabin-house, watching the
frigates, the tropics, gulls, boobys, and other sea-birds that
sported through the sky in great numbers. The frigate-birds were
called by the sailors the man-of-war bird, and also the sea-hawk.
They are marvelous flyers, owing to the size of the pectoral muscles,
which compared with those of other birds are extraordinarily large.
They cannot rest on the water, but must sustain their flights from
land to land, yet here they were in mid-ocean.

[Illustration: The ironbound coast of the Marquesas]

[Illustration: A road in Nuka-Hiva]

My eyes would follow one higher and higher till he became a mere dot
in the blue, though but a few minutes earlier he had risen from his
pursuit of fish in the water. He spread his wings fully and did not
move them as he climbed from air-level to air-level, but his long
forked tail expanded and closed continuously.

Sighting a school of flying-fish, which had been driven to frantic
leaps from the sea by purs