the bare hall at Fremantle, and a century since he had played voluntaries in the Baptist church at Hale's Turning. Was it possible that he, weather-beaten young giant, could ever have been that rather girlish lad who had reached so cock-surely down to built-up-pedals, overweeningly satisfied with being able to play "Praise God" by heart? He laughed, with a trace of embarrassment and of wistfulness, at the thought, and sang out an order concerning a refractory filin. Just as he had once been an organist up to the hilt, he was now up to the hilt at being a sailor—a sailor, so to speak, in French.
In the thoroughness of his adaptation he had even seemed to take on the appearance, as well as the character, of his present rôle; for with his brown throat and arms he might have passed for a Marseillais. His accent, owing to daily contact with the Southerners, was reminiscent of the Midi. Only the fineness of his skin under its tan, the precious contours of cheek and lips, the elegance of waist and hip, and a literary turn of phrase, set him apart.
And having exhausted the possibilities of his present rôle, he characteristically projected himself into the next: the rôle of musical disciple—ces soirées de Munich et de Vienne. He rehearsed it in warm June afternoons as he kept his men employed on deck, whilst the enormous saws of the mill screamed and purred their way through twenty-foot logs. In the evening twilight he wandered alone through the woods skirting the village of Samoa, picking berries in the bushes, or mowing off the heads of yellow poppies with a switch. Often he crossed the low strip which separated the bay from the sea, and seated on a dune amid tufts of reed, let his thoughts roam down the track of the moon, as they had done a thousand times in a thousand corners of the world.
Eureka, the up-to-date little city across the harbour, had no attraction for him. He had explored its park,
