man, came back and reported that his cases had been disorderly. One of them had discharged his gun and fallen down the gangway.

We carried them, one by one, to the boats and tugged back and forth across a hot and heaving stretch of water, till they were all landed. Some of them were stirring and made a noise.

When the last boat-load was gone, Dr. Ulswater and I came back under the awning. Norah was washing dishes in the cabin, Mrs. Mink sweeping the deck with a broom. The guns lay along the scuppers. She stopped, and lifted a troubled face to Dr. Ulswater.

"Will it do them any harm?"

Dr. Ulswater seemed subdued: "It will make them sick at the stomach. A—a moral lesson."

"I should think as much!" she said, sweeping vigorously. "That impudent barber! Did he want to be President?"

"I understood he had ambitions."

She hesitated again: "Do you think the revolution ought to succeed, if their government is very bad? Or would it be better to stop it?"

Dr. Ulswater gasped again, but recovered himself, and brought his mind back to gravity and consideration: "My observation has been that, though tropical governments are sometimes objectionable, these frequent violences seldom improve them, and create distress. I think it is generally more benevolent to back the existing state of things."

"Oh! Then I think Captain Jansen had better tie something to the other ship, so that we can pull it after us and give it to the other people. Anyway," she ended, sharply, "I'm sure that conceited thing would make a bad President."

It was high noon when we steered away for Cape Haitien, towing the war-ship. On shore two or three revolutionists were climbing a gully in the cliffs. Others were sousing their heads in the surf. More of them seemed to be still sick or drowsy. Mrs. Mink went to take a nap. Dr. Ulswater and I leaned against the rail. Captain Jansen edged toward us.

"My, my!" he said. He rubbed his beard a moment, shook his head thoughtfully, and went forward.

Dr. Ulswater pressed his handkerchief to his wet forehead. The heat was great.

"Kit," he said, solemnly, "this is a discovery. Personality to burn. Captured by desperate insurrectionists, she demands knock-out drops. She puts them to sleep with a coffee-pot, and bundles them ashore. And why not? She balances the issue of a people, tows off a war-ship, and squelches revolution. Why not? And yet, what a phenomenon of intrepid reason! What a woman!"

CHAPTER IV—THE TROPIC AND THE TEMPERATE

WHEN a chicken drinks," said Dr. Ulswater, "he lifts his head and thanks God, but when a man drinks he doesn't say anything. That is a West-Indian proverb."

I said: "It's a good proverb."

"Well," he went on, "I should say it was, with the chicken, possibly, so to speak, a somewhat mechanical ritual."

We were nearing the end of our cruise. I never wanted less to go back to Portate, but my health was too boisterously good to be denied. It was toward the end of November. In the land of steadfast people, the frost would be on the grass, the wind in the yellow corn-shocks, the good folk gathering to their annual feast of gratitude, far from these lazy seas. Old women with white hair and knitting, old men walking with canes, pink-cheeked girls and big-handed men, children storming the banisters—they would all be there.

"What will you do on Thanksgiving day?" I asked, thinking of the cool cornfields and familiar faces, of farm-yards and houses where chickens used to drink in prayerful attitudes, where men also thanked God when they drank, or ate.

"I have left it to Mrs. Mink. She is considering it."

"How?"

"She is considering me. It amounts to the same thing. Her decision, I should say, would determine my attitude on the question of gratitude."

"What do you mean?"

"I have requested her to consider me matrimonially," he said. "I fear she is considering me in the light of Foreign Missions.

"I have presented to Mrs. Mink," he continued, "as bearing on the point, one of the clearest analogical arguments you ever saw. It is as follows: The business of the tropic and temperate zones is to entertain and supplement each other. They trade experiences—as they trade crude rubber for sewing machines—to the profit of both parties. Put them together and there arises in the mind of each a sense of romantic surprise. Providence has supplied the need of man for permanent astonishment by a trifling gradation of heat, so that when either shall feel the need for something miraculous and incongruous, it has only to find the other. I have pointed out to Mrs. Mink that her sailing in the tropics was only falling in with this arrangement of Providence, and she was pleased to hear it. Going about on loose seas in lazy climates sometimes had seemed to her a lax and disorderly kind of conduct, and having it attached that way to Providence made her feel better. I said to Mrs. Mink: 'It's a doctrine of the present age that the tropics are best administered and managed, for the good of all, by the temperate zone. Civilisation is now tending to that end. Now, you, Mrs. Mink, are a temperate zone. I am a tropical one. You have administrative ability. I am a heterogeneous person, untidy, overflowing, and hankering to be administered. You are the one, I am the other. Hence our mutual functions, destinies, relations to each other, have been arranged and foreordained by Providence. Quod erat demonstrandum.' That was my argument to Mrs. Mink."

I said: "It's a good argument. How does she like it?"

"Mrs. Mink," he said, "is reflective but unconvinced. The extent to which she is unconvinced is alarming. I can't deny it."

I left them the day after Thanksgiving, at San Juan in Porto Rico, and went back to Portate. Singular town, Portate. Singular man, Dr. Ulswater. Singular planet around which the Violetta was setting out with its critical, exploring prow.

It was some two months after, when I received Dr. Ulswater's first letter. Altogether he sent me four letters. Letters! rather manuscripts, documents, written in his own mellow and tumultuous style. They made that wandering hearth and home of the Violetta a vivid enough picture to my mind. I followed its course from sea to sea, from island to island, wishing myself aboard her. Here follow the documents.

CHAPTER V—FIRST DOCUMENT. DR. ULSWATER'S NARRATIVE: FIRST ADVENTURE

Trinidad—January.

WHAT a world! What a woman!

From the way in which Mrs. Mink collected you and me, it was clear that she had a knack, a genius, nay, even let us say, a tendency toward collecting people. In point of fact, no sooner were you gone than she collected a Professor of Logic.

His name was Simpson, Professor Simpson. It was at San Juan. Why did she collect him? Now you speak of it, I reckon it was for a sort of a breakwater to me. Gracious heavens! It wasn't for want of logic. Never! But it is just possible that she found me, at the time,—I suspected it—that she found me rather—shall I say?—overflowing, rather a deluge.

Professor Simpson was a man whose presence I should ordinarily have welcomed for the educational value of his company, but I didn't welcome him. He was small in person, dry of face, categorical in manner, testy in temper, Presbyterian in religion, pedantic in language, undoubtedly learned. But did he understand his function to be merely a breakwater to me? He did not. Let that pass for the present. Mrs. Mink collected him at San Juan, and we steamed away to Martinique. Here, one day, on or about the tenth of December, we lay in the roadstead of St. Pierre.

We were intending to go on that day, but