settled back on
its foundations. Half the china on the table was shattered, while the
eight-day clock stopped. Yelling for vengeance, the three men rushed out
into the night, and the bombardment began.

When they returned, there was no Bertie. He had dragged himself away
to the office, barricaded himself in, and sunk upon the floor in a
gin-soaked nightmare, wherein he died a thousand deaths while the
valorous fight went on around him. In the morning, sick and headachey
from the gin, he crawled out to find the sun still in the sky and God
presumable in heaven, for his hosts were alive and uninjured.

Harriwell pressed him to stay on longer, but Bertie insisted on sailing
immediately on the Arla for Tulagi, where, until the following steamer
day, he stuck close by the Commissioner's house. There were lady
tourists on the outgoing steamer, and Bertie was again a hero, while
Captain Malu, as usual, passed unnoticed. But Captain Malu sent back
from Sydney two cases of the best Scotch whiskey on the market, for he
was not able to make up his mind as to whether it was Captain Hansen or
Mr Harriwell who had given Bertie Arkwright the more gorgeous insight
into life in the Solomons.

THE INEVITABLE WHITE MAN

"The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as
long as black is black and white is white."

So said Captain Woodward. We sat in the parlor of Charley Roberts' pub
in Apia, drinking long Abu Hameds compounded and shared with us by the
aforesaid Charley Roberts, who claimed the recipe direct from Stevens,
famous for having invented the Abu Hamed at a time when he was spurred
on by Nile thirst--the Stevens who was responsible for "With Kitchener
to Kartoun," and who passed out at the siege of Ladysmith.

Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of
tropic sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in
a man, spoke from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald
pate bespoke a tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy
was the advertisement, front and rear, on the right side of his neck,
where an arrow had at one time entered and been pulled clean through. As
he explained, he had been in a hurry on that occasion--the arrow impeded
his running--and he felt that he could not take the time to break off
the head and pull out the shaft the way it had come in. At the present
moment he was commander of the SAVAII, the big steamer