and could be obtained.

On a moonlight night it was fine to sit here and watch the great
breakers coming in, all marbled and clouded and rainbowed with
spindrift and sheets of spray. But the snow and the song of them under
the diffused light of the stars produced a more indescribably beautiful
and strange effect.

The tide was going out now, and Mr Button, as he sat smoking his pipe
and drinking his grog, could see bright mirrors here and there where
the water lay in rock-pools. When he had contemplated these sights for
a considerable time in complete contentment, he returned to the lagoon
side of the reef and sat down beside the little barrel. Then, after a
while, if you had been standing on the strand opposite, you would have
heard scraps of song borne across the quivering water of the lagoon.

"Sailing down, sailing down,
On the coast of Barbaree."

Whether the coast of Barbary in question is that at San Francisco, or
the true and proper coast, does not matter. It is an old-time song; and
when you hear it, whether on a reef of coral or a granite quay, you may
feel assured that an old-time sailor-man is singing it, and that the
old-time sailor-man is bemused.

Presently the dinghy put off from the reef, the sculls broke the
starlit waters and great shaking circles of light made rhythmical
answer to the slow and steady creak of the thole pins against the
leather. He tied up to the aoa, saw that the sculls were safely
shipped; then, breathing heavily, he cast off his boots for fear of
waking the "childer." As the children were sleeping more than two
hundred yards away, this was a needless precaution especially as the
intervening distance was mostly soft sand.

Green cocoa-nut juice and rum mixed together are pleasant enough to
drink, but they are better drunk separately; combined, not even the
brain of an old sailor can make anything of them but mist and
muddlement; that is to say, in the way of thought--in the way of action
they can make him do a lot. They made Paddy Button swim the lagoon.

The recollection came to him all at once, as he was walking up the
strand towards the wigwam, that he had left the dinghy tied to the
reef. The dinghy was, as a matter of fact, safe and sound tied to the
aoa; but Mr Button's memory told him it was tied to the reef. How he
had crossed the lagoon was of no importance at all to him; the fact
that he had crossed without the boat, yet without getting wet, did not
appear to