"With those beautiful palms waving always over one's head, and that delicious evening air blowing cool through their branches! It looks such a Paradise!" Felix smiled and glanced down at her, as he steadied himself with one hand against the bulwark, while the ship rolled over into the trough of the sea heavily.

"Well, I don't know about that, Miss Ellis," he answered with a doubtful air, eying her close as he spoke with eyes of evident admiration.

"One might be happy anywhere, of course--in suitable society; but if you'd lived as long among cocoanuts in Fiji as I have, I dare say the poetry of these calm palm-grove islands would be a little less real to you.

Remember, though they look so beautiful and dreamy against the sky like that, at sunset especially (that was a heavy one, that time; I'm really afraid we must go down to the cabin soon; she'll be shipping seas before long if we stop on deck much later--and yet, it's so delightful stopping up here till the dusk comes on, isn't it ?)--well, remember, I was saying, though they look so beautiful and dreamy and poetical--'Summer isles of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea,' and all that sort of thing--these islands are inhabited by the fiercest and most bloodthirsty cannibals known to travellers." "Cannibals!" Muriel repeated, looking up at him in surprise.

"You don't mean to say that islands like these, standing right in the very track of European steamers, are still heathen and cannibal ?" "Oh, dear, yes," Felix replied, holding his hand out as he spoke to catch his companion's arm gently, and steady her against the wave that was just going to strike the stern: "Excuse me; just so; the sea's rising fast, isn't it ?--Oh, dear, yes; of course they are; they're all heathen and cannibals.