n the pocket of his coat. Then he led the way uphill, muttering
as he went.

The higher they got, the less dense became the trees and the fewer the
cocoa-nut palms. The cocoa-nut palm loves the sea, and the few they had
here all had their heads bent in the direction of the lagoon, as if
yearning after it.

They passed a cane-brake where canes twenty feet high whispered
together like bulrushes. Then a sunlit sward, destitute of tree or
shrub, led them sharply upward for a hundred feet or so to where a
great rock, the highest point of the island, stood, casting its shadow
in the sunshine. The rock was about twenty feet high, and easy to
climb. Its top was almost flat, and as spacious as an ordinary
dinner-table. From it one could obtain a complete view of the island
and the sea.

Looking down, one's eye travelled over the trembling and waving
tree-tops, to the lagoon; beyond the lagoon to the reef, beyond the
reef to the infinite-space of the Pacific. The reef encircled the whole
island, here further from the land, here closer; the song of the surf
on it came as a whisper, just like the whisper you hear in a shell;
but, a strange thing, though the sound heard on the beach was
continuous, up here one could distinguish an intermittency as breaker
after breaker dashed itself to death on the coral strand below.

You have seen a field of green barley ruffled over by the wind, just so
from the hill-top you could see the wind in its passage over the sunlit
foliage beneath.

It was breezing up from the south-west, and banyan and cocoa-palm, artu
and breadfruit tree, swayed and rocked in the merry wind.

So bright and moving was the picture of the breeze-swept sea, the blue
lagoon, the foam-dashed reef, and the rocking trees that one felt one
had surprised some mysterious gala day, some festival of Nature more
than ordinarily glad.

As if to strengthen the idea, now and then above the trees would burst
what seemed a rocket of coloured stars. The stars would drift away in a
flock on the wind and be lost. They were flights of birds. All-coloured
birds peopled the trees below blue, scarlet, dove-coloured, bright of
eye, but voiceless. From the reef you could see occasionally the
seagulls rising here and there in clouds like small puffs of smoke.

The lagoon, here deep, here shallow, presented, according to its depth
or shallowness, the colours of ultra-marine or sky. The broadest parts
were the palest, because the most shal