nine hundred and forty-four, isn't it? Let me see; four sixes is twenty-four; put down four and carry two: four three's is twelve, and two's fourteen: four two's—yes, that's all right: nine hundred and forty-four, you see, ex-actly. Well, then, look here, Julian: unless Tanaki's further off than nine hundred and forty-four nautical miles—which isn't likely—we ought to get there by twelve o'clock on Wednesday at latest. Nine hundred and forty-four miles is an awful long stretch for two boys to come in an open boat. I don't expect these boys can have done as much as that or anything like it."

"Wind and current were with them," I objected, "and she was drifting like one o'clock when we first sighted her. I shouldn't be surprised if she was making five or six knots an hour before half a gale all through that hard blow. And the poor boys look as if they might have been out a week or more. Still, it isn't likely they would have come nine hundred knots, as you say, or anything like it. If we put on all steam, we ought to arrive in time to save their father and mother. Anyhow we'll try it." And I shouted down the speaking tube, "Hi, you there, engineer!—pile on the coal hard and make her travel. We want all the speed we can get out of the Albatross for the next three days."

"All square, sir," says Jenkins; and he piled on, accordingly.

So we steamed ahead as hard as we could go, in the direction where we expected to find Tanaki.

Half an hour later, Nassaline, who had been down below with the Malay cook and one of the men, looking after the patients, came up on deck once more, with a broad grin on his jet-black face from ear to ear, and exclaimed in his very best Kanaka-English, "Boy come round again. Eat plenty arrowroot. Eat allee samee like as if starvee. Call very hard for see Massa Captain."

"What do you think's the matter with them, Nassaline?" I asked, as I walked along by his side towards the companion-ladder.

Nassaline's ideas were exclusively confined to a certain fixed and narrow Polynesian circle. "Tink him fader go sell him for laborer to a man oui-oui, or make oven hot for him," he answered, grinning; "so him run away, and come put himself aboard Massa Captain ship; so eat plenty—no beat, no starvee."

It was his own personal history put in brief, and he fitted it at once as the only possible explanation to these other poor fugitives.

"Nonsense!" I said, with a compassionate smile at his innocence. "White people don't sell or eat their children, stupid! It's my belief, Nassaline, we'll never make a civilized Christian creature of you, in a tall hat, and with a glass in your eye. You ain't cut out for it, somehow. How many times have I explained to you, boy, that Christians never cook and eat their enemies?... They only love them, and blow them up with Gatlings or Armstrongs—a purely fraternal method of expressing slight differences of international opinion.... Now, come along down and let's see these lads. It's some of your heathen relations, I expect, the poor fellows are flying from."

But I omitted to have remarked to him (as I might have done) that I hadn't seen such a painful sight before, since I saw the inhabitants of a French village in Lorraine—old men, young girls, and mothers with babies pressed against their breasts—flying, pell-mell, before the sudden onslaught of a hundred and fifty Christian Prussian Uhlans. These little peculiarities of our advanced civilization are best not mentioned to the heathen Polynesian.

In the cabin we found both boys now fairly on the high-road to recovery, though still, of course, much too weak to talk; but bursting over, for all that, with eagerness to tell us their whole eventful history. For my own part, I, too, was all eagerness to hear it; but anxiety for their safety made me restrain my impatience. The elder boy, now leaning on his elbow and staring wildly before him with horror—a mere skeleton to look at, with his sunken cheeks and great hollow eyes—began to break forth upon me with his long tale in full; but I soon put a stop to that, you may be pretty sure, with most uncompromising promptitude. "My dear Mr. Martin Luther Macglashin," I said severely, giving him the full benefit of all his own various high-sounding names for greater impressiveness, "if you don't lean back this moment upon your pillow, quiet your rolling eye down to everyday proportions, and answer only in the shortest possible words nothing but the plain questions I put to you, hang me, sir, if I don't turn you and John Knox adrift again upon the wild waves, and continue on my course for Levuka in Fiji."

"Why, how did you come to know our names?" he exclaimed, astonished. "You must be as sharp as a lynx, Captain."

"That's not an answer to my question I asked you," I replied with as much sternness as I could put into my voice, looking at the poor fellow's starved white face. "But as a special favor to a deserving fellow-creature, I don't mind telling you. I'm as sharp as a lynx, as you say, and a trifle sharper: for no lynx would have looked for your names on the flap of your shirts—There, that'll do now; don't try to talk; just answer me quietly. Where do you come from, and where do you want us to go to?"

Martin lifted up his face and answered with becoming brevity, "Tanaki."

"That's better!" I said. "That's the sort of way a fellow ought to answer, when he's more than half-starved with a week at sea. But the next thing is, where's Tanaki?"

"It's one of the group that used to be called the Duke of Cumberland's Islands," the boy answered faintly, yet overflowing with eagerness. "They lie just beyond the Ellice Archipelago, nearly on the line of a hundred and eighty, as you go towards the Union Group along the parallel of"....

"Now, my dear boy," I said, "if you run on like that, as I said before, I shall have to turn you adrift again in your open boat at the mercy of the ocean. Do be quiet, won't you, and let me look up your island?"

"We can't be quiet," Master John Knox put in eagerly, "when we know they're going to murder our father and mother and Calvin and Miriam, on Wednesday morning."

"Just you hold your tongue, sir," I said, pushing him down again on his bunk, "and wait till you're spoken to. Now, not another word, either of you, till I've consulted my chart. Jim, hand down the Admiralty sheets again, there's a good fellow, will you?"

Jim handed them down, and we commenced our scrutiny at once. We soon found the Duke of Cumberland's Islands, and as good luck would have it, found we were steering as straight as an arrow for them. The direction of the wind had not misled us. But no such place as Tanaki could we still find anywhere.

"It used to be called 'The Long Reef,'" Martin said, looking up; "but now we call it by the native name, Tanaki."

"Oh! The Long Reef," I said; "why didn't you say so at first? I know that well enough by sight on the chart; but I never heard it called Tanaki before. That accounts, of course, for the milk in the cocoa-nut. Jim, hand along the calipers here, and let's measure out the course. Two—four—six—eight," I went on, looping along line of sailing with the calipers. "A trifle short of eight hundred miles. Say