nd over her eyes, and with suppressed giggles went down to the beach
with the man, carrying a basket of steaming food. Launching a light
canoe they pushed off, and as the man paddled the women sang in the soft
Hawaiian tongue.

"Happy beggars," said my comrade to me, as he stood up and stretched his
lengthy, stalwart figure, "work all day, and sit up gambling and singing
hymns--when they are not intriguing with each other's husbands and
wives."

The place was Providence Atoll in the North Pacific, a group of
seventeen uninhabited islands lying midway between the Marshall and
Caroline Archipelagoes--that is to say, that they had been uninhabited
for some years, until we came there with our gang of natives to catch
sharks and make coco-nut oil. There was no one to deny us, for the man
who claimed the islands, Captain "Bully" Hayes, had given us the right
of possession for two years, we to pay him a certain percentage of our
profits on the oil we made, and the sharks' fins and tails we cured.
The story of Providence Atoll (the "Arrecifos" of the early Spanish
navigators, and the "Ujilang" of the native of Micronesia) cannot here
be told--suffice it to say that less than fifty years before over
a thousand people dwelt on the seventeen islands in some twelve or
fourteen villages. Then came some dread disease which swept them away,
and when Hayes sailed into the great lagoon in 1860--his was the first
ship that ever entered it--he found less than a score of survivors.
These he treated kindly; but for some reason soon removed them to Ponape
in the Carolines, and then years passed without the island being visited
by any one except Hayes, who used it as a rendezvous, and brought other
natives there to make oil for him. Then, in a year or so, these, too,
he took away, for he was a restless man, and had many irons in the fire.
Yet there was a fortune there, as its present German owners know, for
the great chain of islands is covered with coco-nut trees which yield
many thousands of pounds' worth of copra annually.

My partner and I had been working the islands for some months, and had
done fairly well. Our native crew devoted themselves alternately to
shark catching and oil making. The lagoon swarmed with sharks, the fins
and tails of which when dried were worth from sixty to eighty pounds
sterling per ton. (Nowadays the entire skins of sharks are bought by
some of the traders on several of the Pacific Islands on behalf of a
fi