* * * *

To-night, as a chill December wind wails through the leafless elms
and chestnuts of this quiet Kentish village, I think of that far-away
Christmas eve, and the rough, honest, sun-browned faces of the men who
were around me, and pressed my hand when Peter Huysmans spoke of home
and Christmas, and Tom Devine of 'the dear faces whom we never might see
again.' For only one, with the writer, is left. MacBride and his gentle,
sweet-voiced Sera went to their death a year or two later in the savage
and murderous Solomons; Wolfen and his wife and children perished at sea
when the _Sadie Foster_ schooner turned turtle off the Marshalls; and
Devine and Charley de Buis, comrades to the last, sailed away to the
Moluccas in a ten-ton boat and were never heard of again--their fate is
one of the many mysteries of the deep. Peter Huysmans is alive and well,
and only a year ago I grasped his now trembling hand in mighty London,
and spoke of our meeting on Milli Lagoon.

And then again, in a garish and tinselled City bar, we raised our
glasses and drank to the memory of those who had gone before.

THE END

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