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When they got the great carcass alongside, they found embedded in the blubber no fewer than fourteen harpoons, besides sundry fragments of exploded bombs, each bearing mute but eloquent testimony to the warlike career of the vanquished Titan who began his career as an orphan.

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Far away to the horizon on three sides of us stretched the sea, its wavelets all sparkling in the sun-glade, and dancing under the touch of the sedate trade-wind. Above hung a pale-blue dome quivering with heat and light from the sun, that, halfway up his road to the zenith, seemed to be in the act of breaking his globular limit and flooding space with flame. Ah! it was indeed pleasant to lie on that little patch of pure sand, firm and smooth as a boarded floor, with the rocks fringed by greenery of many kinds overshadowing us, and the ocean murmuring at our feet.

The place was a little promontory on the eastern shore of Hapai, in the Friendly Islands, and my companion, who lay on the sand near me, was by birth a chief, a splendid figure of a man, with a grave, intellectual face, and deep, solemn voice that refused to allow the mangled English in which he spoke to seem laughable. I knew him to be the senior deacon of the local chapel, a devotionalist of the most rigid kind, yet by common consent a righteous man, well-beloved by all who knew him. He was my “flem” or friend, who, of his own initiative, kept me supplied with all such luxuries as the village afforded, and so great was my admiration for him as a man that it was with no ordinary delight I succeeded in persuading him to accompany me on a holiday ramble. He had led me through forest paths beset by a thousand wonders of beauty in vegetation and insect life, showing me as we went how the untilled ground produced on every hand abundance of delicious food for man, up over hills from whence glimpses of land and sea scape incessantly flashed upon the sight till my eyes grew weary of enjoying, over skirting reefs just creaming with the indolent wash of the sea, every square yard of which held matter for a life’s study, but all beautiful beyond superlatives. And at last, weary with wondering no less than with the journey, we had reached this sheltered nook and laid down to rest, lulled into dreamy peace by the murmurs of the Pacific rippling beneath us.