In a few weeks I found myself taking in the South Sea Islands, admiring the pretty lagoons, those tiny inner-ocean retreats, where the glistening sandy beach is strewn with miniature shells cozily protected by the surrounding palm groves, upon whose outer shore the mighty waves come pounding in only to recede without disturbing the finny tribes who never venture outside of these inland tiny lagoons.

At Apia, in the Samoa group, where lies the body of Robert L. Stevenson, I wondered not at his choice of selection for spending the last days of his life. Here among the South Sea Islands he could muse unmolested, far from the struggle for gain, and notoriety. There is a beautiful side to those so-called barbarian lives, and one is tempted to envy them their freedom as they laugh and sing in the bamboo shade, and bathe at ease in the soft waves of the grand old Pacific Ocean. One can but love them for their simplicity and confiding way as their wistful smile pleads for your generosity and sympathy.

The wonder-land in the Friendly or South Sea Island is Tongo-Taboo. Here one finds undoubted traces of a lost continent, in the way of an archway, or portal, through which a people must have passed before the dawn of Babylonian tradition. Two immense rectangular stone columns are seen tied together at the top by an enormous slab, on which rests a huge stone bowl, The entire structure must be nearly fifty feet high.

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There is no quarry on this little island from which it could have been taken, neither could it have been brought from a distant land, for ancient boats were not adequate.

The quarry from which it came, the mysteries of the people who such art designed, and the homes in which they lived, must be nearby, beneath the waves.

To satisfy curiosity, I took a shell boat to Easter Island, where those strange saint-like statues with sealed lips now stand, pre-eminent sentinels, as they have stood since the day when the Mid-Pacific continent was a prominent feature on our globe. On this tiny mid-ocean world the natives know about as much concerning the origin of their clans as we do about pre-existence. They shelter from storm in stone houses, of which the walls are four or five feet thick.

Many of the inner walls still bear traces of an intelligent people. Hieroglyphic characters and paintings of birds and other animals adorn the inner walls of what must have been the mansions of nabobs, while many statues of these unknown people with thin lips and serious countenances stand facing the sea. Like the fort on the Helomano and the colossal on Tonga, they speak for themselves, and while each have no tradition of other tribes, still all their languages spring from the same roots.

As I stood on deck gazing at these faces a spell came over me and from above I looked down on our world 100,000 years ago.

Before me lay an elbow-shaped mid-Pacific continent 2,000 miles wide and 8,000 miles long, on which millions of half-civilized people were passing their days and years as we are now doing, while the land of the morning sun teemed with shore and inland animal life roaming over the vast plains sheltered by primeval forests. Suddenly, as I gazed, the world trembled and reeled as the vast plains at the rising sun begun belching forth lightning and fire amid peals of thunder destroying all animal life as an immense mountain range came forth like a budless blossom far up and down the ocean shore.

In horror I turned to the mid-ocean continent and beheld it with all its cities and inhabitants sinking down, down beneath the ocean waves.

From this reverie I awoke and wondered who would dare dispute, as soundings prove that such a continent, with the exception of a few mountain peaks we call islands, now sleep beneath those ocean waves, while the bones and fossils of mammalia are found on the Rocky Mountain Range.

After visiting the Maories of New Zealand, one of the remaining fragments of the South Sea Island tribes, who are probably the finest specimen of aboriginies in the world, I took in Australia, where the white cockatoo parrots move in great flocks and the many species of kangaroo, from the size of a rabbit to a horse, sport in the gardens to the annoyance of the pioneer farmers, and where the sun shines in from the north windows, the north star and great dipper have disappeared, and beautiful new constellations appear in the southern skies, and the mountains of the moon are seen from the other side.