should be sacked and committed to the deep; he could stand it no
longer.

Murder is catching. At first I almost jumped at the proposition; but
as quickly rejected it. Ah! Annatoo: Woman unendurable: deliver me,
ye gods, from being shut up in a ship with such a hornet again.

But are we yet through with her? Not yet. Hitherto she had continued
to perform the duties of the office assigned her since the
commencement of the voyage: namely, those of the culinary department.
From this she was now deposed. Her skewer was broken. My Viking
solemnly averring, that he would eat nothing more of her concocting,
for fear of being poisoned. For myself, I almost believed, that there
was malice enough in the minx to give us our henbane broth.

But what said Samoa to all this? Passing over the matter of the
cookery, will it be credited, that living right among us as he did,
he was yet blind to the premeditated though unachieved peccadilloes
of his spouse? Yet so it was. And thus blind was Belisarius himself,
concerning the intrigues of Antonina.

Witness that noble dame's affair with the youth Theodosius; when her
deluded lord charged upon the scandal-mongers with the very horns she
had bestowed upon him.

Upon one occasion, seized with a sudden desire to palliate Annatoo's
thievings, Samoa proudly intimated, that the lady was the most
virtuous of her sex.

But alas, poor Annatoo, why say more? And bethinking me of the hard
fate that so soon overtook thee, I almost repent what has already and
too faithfully been portrayed.

CHAPTER XXXVI
The Parki Gives Up The Ghost

A long calm in the boat, and now, God help us, another in the
brigantine. It was airless and profound.

In that hot calm, we lay fixed and frozen in like Parry at the Pole.
The sun played upon the glassy sea like the sun upon the glaciers.

At the end of two days we lifted up our eyes and beheld a low,
creeping, hungry cloud expanding like an army, wing and wing, along
the eastern horizon. Instantly Jarl bode me take heed.

Here be it said, that though for weeks and weeks reign over the
equatorial latitudes of the Pacific, the mildest and sunniest of
days; that nevertheless, when storms do come, they come in their
strength: spending in a few, brief blasts their concentrated rage.
They come like the Mamelukes: they charge, and away.

It wanted full an hour to sunset; but the sun was well nigh obscured.
It seemed toiling among bleak Scythian steeps in t