. We had a fair number of them, off and
on--the missionary bark, the _Equator_, Captain Reid; the _Lorelei_,
Captain Saxe; the _Ransom_, Captain Mins; the _Belle Brandon_, Captain
Cole; the brigantine _Trenton_, in ballast, calling in to set her
rigging; the cutter _Ulysses_, with supplies for Washington Island, and
the Seventh-Day Adventist schooner _Pitcairn_, with her mate dying of
some kind of sickness. They buried him ashore, and then went out again,
after giving us the precise date at which the world was coming to an
end, and saying what a hell of a poor millennium it was going to be for
anybody save _them_! Oh, yes, the usual straggle of vessels that
happened our way, with months between; and, once, the smoke of a steamer
on the horizon.

Perhaps a matter of eighteen months altogether since Old Dibs first
landed, and day followed day, like it might have gone on forever. One
wouldn't have remarked any particular change in him, except that his rig
was getting shabbier and the shine was coming off the stovepipe--and
perhaps some improvement in the flute. This, an extra bulk, and a kind
of contented look he hadn't wore before, was what life on the island had
done for Old Dibs; and he branched out a bit in the line of household
favorite, cutting kindling wood for Sarah, gutting fish, scraping
cocoanut for the chickens; and the pair of them would sit and gossip for
hours about the neighbors--how Taalolo had driven his wife out of doors,
and the true inwardness of the king's quarrel with Ve'a, and why the
Toto family was in ambush to cut off Tehea's nose. He could talk better
native than I could, and he was made a pet of everywhere around the
settlement, and there was seldom a pig killed but what they'd bring him
the head out of respeck. Not that he wasn't as regular as ever at the
graveyard; but he had kind of shook in, so to speak, and nobody gave a
feast but what he sat at the right hand and divided honors with the
pastor and the king.

One afternoon, from the bench, I heard them raise a cry of "_Pahi,
Pahi_," and I run out of the copra-shed, where I was weighing, to see a
schooner heading in. She was a smart-looking little vessel of fifty or
sixty tons, and she come up hand over hand, making a running mooring
off the settlement. Tom and I was waiting for her in a canoe, Old Dibs
meanwhile climbing into the attic and dropping the trapdoor, with "Under
Two Flags" and a lamp to support the tedium. That was getting to