THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN. 107 



of terrapin, gathered about a feast to be treated by fork 

 and spoon, not by stupid pen. Man's capacity for good liv- 

 ing is fortunately limited ; but for this night's work each 

 ■ man's appetite seemed endless as my neiglibor, Tetty Wor- 

 rah's, parsnip, which penetrated so deep into the earth that 

 a strong smell of tea came up through the hole it bored. 



After the feast came the soothing pipe; but the more 

 thoughtful remarked the continued absence of the two seal- 

 hunters; and as the sudden darkness of the tropics settled 

 upon us, strange tales of adventure in these islands were 

 told by the older men — stories of lost seamen, never found, 

 who pi'obably had fallen into the volcanic pits and traps. Jim 

 Sellers, learned in the lore of deep water, averred that these 

 were enchanted lands, differing in all respects from other 

 islands. Of the hundreds of islands which shoot out of the 

 deep blue water, he said there is not one that was not born 

 in volcanic fires. All that we tread upon has been a bottom 

 of the sea, and there has been a fight through the ages of 

 fire against water. The wild imagination of a Western 

 tourist suggested the picture of Niagara pouring into Ve- 

 suvius — a grand tournament of the elements, surely, yet 

 baby's play compared to the scenes in which these islands 

 had their birth. Jim held further that Fiddler's Green 

 could not be enjoyed by good sailors were "hazing cap- 

 tains " allowed to anchor their souls in its happy port with- 

 out a thorough overhauling of life's log; -and he showed 

 that the islands we were in must be the probationary cruis- 

 ing-ground of the misdoers. In these rainless deseils, in the 

 forms of terrapin, they do penance for their rancorous sea- 

 life, and their only liberation and clean bill of health comes 

 through the sea-pie, and the satisfied hunger of the sailor 

 whom they once hazed and bedeviled. Old Jim avers that 

 he well knows the wicked, winking eyes of an old terrapin 

 lying staring by the hour into the glimmering embers of the 



