-boys and good feeling and port wine in the cabin
than you could ever have thought possible under the circumstances.

* * * * *

Was that all? Well, for a time it was, Coe slipping out at dawn on the
ebb with a cargo of Afiola rapscallions he was to drop, one here, one
there, all around the Group, we having no further use for them in Puna
Punou.

The measles struck us shortly afterwards in a Tahiti bark, and it
carried off a sight of people, Afiola included, who was in a sort of
armed hiding on the other side of the island. Tweedie, too, who had
always been a complaining whelp, started up a cough about this time, and
died. Of course, this wasn't right off, but spread over a matter of
eighteen months or more, Coe coming and going regular in the _Peep o'
Day_, and Mrs. Tweedie more blooming than ever.

Coe turned up from Sydney, where he had gone for a general refitting and
overhaul, just as Mrs. Tweedie was taking her passage in the _Olive
Branch_, missionary auxiliary barkentine for Honolulu. None of the
saints would have a word to say to him, calling him "the man of blood,"
and ordering him off the ship, as he stood his ground and wouldn't budge
even when the anchor was apeak and the barkentine under steerage way.
But he kept singing out for her while they tried to hustle him over the
side and into his boat, and the more they hustled the louder he shouted,
"Mrs. Tweedie! Mrs. Tweedie!" till at last she heard him in her cabin
below, and came running up, smiling, and arranging her hair with her
hands.

It was a tight place for Coe, having to do his courting while they were
moving him on like the police; but, for all that, when he went down the
ladder it was with Mrs. Tweedie with him, and they pulled ashore and
were married by the Kanaka pastor, and went a-honeymooning in the _Peep
o' Day_, bringing up in Papiete three weeks later, to buy her some
clothes, for every stitch to her name was beating up to Honolulu in the
_Olive Branch_.

MR. BOB

Far away in the western Pacific, in that labyrinth of coral reefs and
low, palm-rimmed isles floating between the blue of heaven and the
deeper blue of sea, known to the pajama-clad, ear-ringed traders as "the
Group," and to the outer world as Micronesia--here, one burning morning
there arrived a visitor from "Home," who descended, not from some tubby
bark or slant-masted schooner, but Godlike from the glorious stars
themselves--Chris