IN the Fall of the year when Krakatoa blew its head off in the East Indies, and sent its dust around the world, I fell sick of a fever in the city of Portate, which is on the west coast of South America. Portate had the latest brand of municipal enterprise and the oldest brand of fever. But they call any kind of sickness a fever there, to save trouble, and bury the alien with as little trouble as possible. I started for home, and came as far as Nassau, which is a town in the Bahamas. There, a wasted and dismal shape, I somehow fell into the hands of one Dr. Ulswater, who tended and medicined by back into the world of sunlight and other interesting objects.

Nassau runs up the side of a bluff and overlooks a blue and dimpled harbour. Dr. Ulswater at last began to take me with him, to lie on the rocks and watch him search in the harbour shoals for small cuttlefish. He used a three-pronged spear to stir them out of their lairs, and a long knife to put into their vital points with skilful surgery. They waved and slapped their wild blistered arms around his neck and shoulders, while he poked placidly into their vitality. So, being entertained and happy, I recovered from yellow fever.

By that time my handsome name, given by parents who recognised my merits, “Christopher Kirby,” had come down handily in Dr. Ulswater's usage to “Kit,” and we loved each other as two men can who are to each other a perpetual entertainment.

Dr. Ulswater was a large, bushy man in the prime of a varied life. Born an American, he had studied in German universities, practised medicine in Italy, and afterward in Ceylon. One of his hobbies was South-American archaeology. He owned a silver mine in Nevada, and kept a sort of residence in New York at this time, and was collecting specimens for a New England museum. So that he was what you might call a distributed man, for he had been in most countries of the globe; yet he was not a “globe-trotter,” but rather a floater,—in a manner resembling sea-weed, that drifts from place to place, but, wherever it drifts or clings, is tranquil and accommodating. He seemed to me suitable to the tropics and their seas,—large, easy, and warm of body; his learning like the sea, mysterious and bottomless; his mind luxuriously fertile, but somewhat ungoverned. His idioms were mixed, his conversations opalescent; his criticism of himself was that he had not personality enough.

“No, my dear,” he said, wrapping a dead cuttlefish up neatly in its own arms, “I am like a cuttlefish whose vital point is loose. You are an ignorant person, with prepossessions beyond belief, and absurd deferences for clothing and cleanliness; but you have personality and entertaining virtues. Therefore I will let you smoke two cigars to-night instead of one, and to-morrow maybe three, for your sickness is becoming an hypocrisy.” Then we went over the rocks to our boat and the sulky sleepy negro boatman, the doctor with his flabby bundled cuttlefish, and I with a basket full of coral and conch-shells. The boatman rowed us out over a sea garden with submerged coral grottos; pink and white coral, branching and the “brain” coral, sea-fans and purple sea-feathers, coral shrubs, coral in shelving masses; also sponges, and green hanging moss, and yellow, emerald, and scarlet fish, silver, satin, ringed, fringed, spotted;—all deep beneath in their liquid, deluding atmosphere,—a cold vision, outlandish, brilliant, and grotesque, over which we floated and looked down.

“Hypocrisy, pretence, illusion!” went on Dr. Ulswater. “Yet we attach to these words a meaning of praise or condemnation which begs the question. The personality is all, the point of view. To observe an alcyonoid polyp through thirty feet of water, an ineffable vision! or under a microscope which pronounces the ineffable vision hypocrisy, pretence, illusion!—in which is there more truth? Is not my hypocrisy an intimate truth of me? Hanged if I know! There is a new yacht in the harbour. We will go to it.”

And we moved across the calm glassy harbour toward the long white steam yacht.

It was a handsome sea-going vessel. Its brasses glistened in the afternoon sunlight. Violetta was its gilt-lettered name. Sailors were busy forward, and a striped awning was over the after-deck. As we drew near, a woman stood up under the awning and came over to the rail; she had some knitting in her hands. I asked if we might come aboard, and the doctor grumbled at me in disgust,—something about “frizzle-brained women.”

“Of course you can,” she said, decisively. “Wait till they bring the steps,” and she disappeared.

“Ha!” he said, “steps! And a Middle West accent! Very good.”

We went aboard, leaving the negro in his boat, and under the striped awning made the acquaintance of Mrs. Mink and a stout, blond-bearded sailing-master, Captain Jansen.