jects, and a large range of human figures is selected for devotional treatment. Custom dictates a uniform glorification of their personal attributes. Their beauty dazzles; their deeds, if they did anything, border upon the miraculous; and the spoken word reflects their unearthly wisdom. Their life, appear ance, mannerisms, tricks of speech, and personal habits are studied with incredible minuteness. Of common men we know little more than the simple fact that they climbed a mountain or saved life from drowning. But of the Great we learn how they pinch sergeants by the ear, fear cats, and take their porridge. In life their slightest tasks and most inconsiderable actions are recorded; after death their most trivial relics are patiently collected; until a grateful world can reconstruct their whole existence from these accumulated personalia. This impulse piles the strangest rubbish-heaps round human reputations. Sometimes we may seem, in our eagerness for personal minutiæ, to honor the Great with a cairn of their cast-off collar-studs.

On every hand we find ourselves invited to admire unheard-of talents, parts without precedent, gifts beyond parallel. The manufacture of Great Men proceeds unceasing. The stamp and thunder of its plant is always audible, as it produces with the alarming volume of a great industry; and, like a great industry, it has its strict departments. The hagiologist makes saints; Carlyle makes heroes; the press-agent, with a simpler apparatus for his astrology, makes stars.

tions makes, if I may hazard the comment, most indifferent history. I do not believe that true history can be written upon a basis of great names. For great events have an awkward way of being totally independent of Great Men; true history is rarely anthropomorphic. Of the facts that shaped the world we live in, the two greatest-the fall of the Roman Empire and the Reformation-are almost anonymous. It is of course always possible to attach personal labels to them after the event, to find a hero for the play and give him all the choicest lines to speak. But I can see no hero in that vague flow of tribes, that incoherent drift of many minds, which made the modern world.

Where, if we look closer, is the man to take the credit of the French, the American, the Russian Revolution? There were so many of him. He stood about the streets; he stoned the soldiers; he put the leaders up and pulled them down; he died at Valmy, at Saratoga, behind Archangel. He is an elusive hero with far too many names. How much easier to select one figure, cast him in bronze, frame suitable inscriptions, collect his sayings, honor his birthday, and make an end of it! Yet even governments, one feels, must have their moments of uncertainty, when they elbow aside the eager claimants for Valhalla and bury an Unknown Soldier. The wise historian will search history for the Unknown Soldiers. For though there is never, perhaps, a Great Man, there is sometimes a great age.

So I am left still wondering about Great Men. There used to be so

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is a dreary kind of itinerary the S.S. Makambo has, to islands where there are naked black men and yellow-visaged white men getting oxygen out of the air, but little else from the world. She spends upward of five weeks trundling around the New Hebrides where England and France are partners in government in a mélange called technically a "condominium" and known locally as the "pandemonium," and she occasionally pushes as far north as Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz group. She plunges right into the islands where malaria and black-water play havoc with the health of both whites and blacks, and she picks up what both have to offer in the way of

copra.

The Makambo is, I should think, the least comfortable vessel left on the face of the waters. Still, except for a distinctive habit of what the wireless man called pile-driving in a head sea, which means that she occasionally lifts her bows and thrashes them down with a couple of rapid and disturbing cracks, she is an excellent sea-boat. One has to admit that, even when one longs for a little deck-space to walk on, when one finds one's hands black with smut from a too intimate funnel,

when one regrets the absence of more than one bath-room and that without warm water and not over clean, and when one either roasts or freezes in the minute smoking-room.

There's much to object to about the Makambo. Still there are several things to be glad about. First there's the captain, as cheery, as kindly, and as clever a skipper as ever sailed a ship, and the only steamship master I have ever met who welcomes passengers on his bridge. Then there's the chief steward and all the other stewards. It's like joining a cheery club when you embark on the Makambo, of which the ship's company are permanent members, eager to welcome new people.

They've got into that way. I think they've got into that way because the white men in the islands at which they call lead lonely and often pitiful lives. Such dash on board the moment she drops anchor and tell every one all about it, meeting not cloying sympathy but something normal and white, and always friendliness.

Now although the Makambo's pathway is not strewn with roses, although she sees the seamier side of island life-for the seduction of blue lagoons, palm-trees, and the

like flies before the anopheles mosquito-yet twice during her itinerary, at the beginning and toward the end, she anchors off a little piece of paradise which unaccountably must have dropped down from heaven into the waters of the Southern Pacific, some 800 miles northwest of New Zealand-Norfolk Island, not the home of black or brown skinned people, but just an area of beauty some fifteen miles in circumference, which knew not man until the year 1774, when Cook in his second voyage around the world found it.

When I've saved up sufficient money to make an income of five hundred dollars a year secure, I'm going to brave the Makambo once more and spend the rest of my life on Norfolk. There's everything a man can possibly want there. There's no fear of loneliness, for the descendants of the mutiny of the Bounty number something like five hundred; Queen Victoria put them there when it was found that Pitcairn was getting overcrowded. For three dollars a week I can rent a semifurnished house with five or six acres attached to supply grazing for my horse; I can fish, shoot, play tennis, dance, go to one of three or four churches, enjoy a movie show once a week, eat all the fruit of all kinds tropical and temperate that I need; my four or five acres will almost support me; and above all I will bask in permanent sunshine which I can enjoy because the climate even in summer-time is not unbearably

warm.

The local inhabitants have just a touch of Tahitian blood inherited from the ladies who risked their fortunes with the Bounty's crew

when she flew from Tahiti, and this gives them a charm, less exotic than the charm found in Tahiti, but more comfortable and less startling. "In the market-place there is money, but"-on Norfolk Island there is peace, contentment, and a good deal of lively amusement. There's no income-tax, by the way, because no one has any income; indeed there are no taxes at all. no taxes at all. A man has, however, to spend six days a year working on the roads, but a plutocrat of five hundred dollars a year can easily hire a man at a dollar a day to do this work for him if he shrinks from it, although it is far from arduous, the road-gang thinking nothing of dropping tools and dashing off to a picnic or riding-party if somebody has got one up.

I had been wandering about the Solomon Islands for upward of two years. While there are millions of acres of land there, during most of that period I had hardly ever seen a field of honest grass or indeed any land, plain honest land, in perspective. One sees merely rank vegetation, so fierce and powerful that it even steals from the sea vast areas in mangrove forests. It has a beauty, but a beauty so passionate that one feels in the way and almost helpless. had wandered from the Solomons to Santa Cruz; here I was picked up by the Makambo, taking passage in her for Sydney by way of the New Hebrides and Norfolk Island. There is a definite atmosphere about Melanesia, included in which, of course, are the Solomons, Santa Cruz, and the New Hebrides; it is not unattractive, but it is rank and powerful, like the vegetation, as though one bathed in

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soapy water without the chance of rinsing. It was therefore with something of a start that one morning I opened my state-room door to find the Makambo anchored in a slight swell and myself looking on land absurdly clean and perhaps a trifle cold, like polished linoleum on the floor of a bedroom in winter. Yet very lovely! Great black rocks meeting the sea, cliffs of yellow, brown, and black reaching to an irregular lawn of healthy green, relieved again by armies of the distinctive Norfolk Island pine marching up the valleys. The Australian government pays the Makambo to remain at Norfolk Island for eight hours. She knows she has got to wait eight hours; the islanders know she must; but her captain is always filled with a comic fury that so much time must be wasted. It is different throughout Melanesia; here the traders rush feverishly to load and unload her, and they're so glad to see her and so eager to keep her as long as possible that she becomes a trifle swollen with importance. But while the Norfolk Islanders are courteous enough, it would take much more than the Makambo's eagerness to get them to display anything more than tentative energy. The Makambo likes Norfolk and its people, but the people fill her with a pleasant contempt which her ship's company never fails to express. Yet there is something to be said for the people.

Norfolk has no harbor; that incidentally represents the flaming sword which has kept the place a Garden of Eden. It is just out of the trade-wind area, and from one day to another it can never be never be

known on which side of the island the vessel will anchor. Upon this occasion we were anchored off the Cascades, the northerly side of the island, for something of a stiff breeze was blowing from the southeast. The center of population, if there is a center since the buildings were burned, is toward the southeast. To get to the Cascades by 7 A.M. the people would have to rise at the crack of dawn, and that they will not do. It was therefore not for some time that any movement was observed ashore. One heard all kinds of jeering remarks about the incurable somnolence of the people.

"Ah-at last, here comes the doctor," as a small two-wheeled carriage appeared on the crest and began to descend the valley. Horsemen followed; finally there was a good deal of movement on the rocks, until a whale-boat was launched, coming slowly out over the big swell to the ship. There was now a good deal of amusing talk about the Norfolk launch, the only power-boat in the island; apparently it went sometimes, but never when wanted.

The long slim whale-boat came alongside. She was manned by islanders, men of varied color, distinctly European, yet with something wild, exotic, and melancholy in large brown eyes. They were barefooted but wore shirts and trousers. We went through the travail of entering and were examined by an elderly medical officer with something comically sardonical about his thin lips, which drooped at the corners. I was most eager to get ashore, apparently more than any one else, since a few moments after medical inspection I found myself