d her
husband would come on board our vessel in the afternoon and have tea,
and mentioned that we had piles and piles of books and magazines on the
ship to which she could help herself.

Her eyes filled with tears. "I guess I should like to," she said as she
looked at her husband.

Then I was introduced to the rest of the company in turn, as they
sat all round the cabin, half a dozen of them on the transom lockers
reminding me somehow of dejected and meditative storks. Glad of an
excuse to get out of the stuffy and ill-ventilated cabin and the
uninspiring society of the unwashed Brethren, I eagerly assented to the
captain's suggestion to have a look round the ship before we "talked
business," _i.e_., concerning the trade goods I was to select in payment
for the provisions with which I had supplied him. One of the Brethren,
an elderly, goat-faced person, came with us, and we returned on deck.

Never before had I seen anything like the _Julia_. She was an old,
soft-pine-built ex-Puget Sound lumberman, literally tumbling to decay,
aloft and below. Her splintering decks, to preserve them somewhat from
the torrid sun, were covered over with old native mats, and her spars,
from want of attention, were splitting open in great gaping cracks, and
were as black as those of a collier. How such a craft made the voyage
from San Francisco to Honolulu, and from there far to the south of the
Line and then back north to the Gilbert Group, was a marvel.

I was taken down the hold and showed what the "cranks" called their
trade goods and asked to select what I thought was a fair thing in
exchange for the provisions I had given them. Heavens! Such a collection
of utter, utter rubbish! second-hand musical boxes in piles, gaudy
lithographs, iron bedsteads, "brown paper" boots and shoes eaten half
away by cockroaches. Sets of cheap and nasty toilet ware, two huge cases
of common and much damaged wax dolls, barrels of rotted dried apples,
and decayed pork, an ice-making plant, bales and bales of second-hand
clothing--men's, women's and children's--cheap and poisonous sweets in
jars, thousands of twopenny looking-glasses, penny whistles, accordions
that wouldn't accord, as the cockroaches had eaten them up except the
wood and metal work, school slates and pencils, and a box of Bibles and
Moody and Sankey hymn-books. And the smell was something awful! I asked
the captain what was the cause of it--it overpowered even the horrible
odour of the