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CHAPTER XV. CHARITY ORGANIZATION OF THE SOUTH SEAS
I fall from Space—Court Violinist—Arrive in Fiji—With the Great Missing.
I wonder why men o’er the buried weep, When ’tis the wandering dead who cannot sleep?
I WAS hanging by one foot from a mystical cloud, lesiurely travelling across the tropic sky, then I lost my grip and fell! I distinctly recall the awful sensation of that noiseless dive through space, ere I arrived with a crash! I had apparently fallen through the roof of a grog-shanty on a Pacific Isle. Many may doubt the aforesaid assertion of mine, and say that such a mishap was a physical impossibility. But I would say that it is only the impossible that _does_ occur. I felt the spasm of that sudden headlong contact of my skull against some hard object very acutely. Opening my eyes I saw astonished traders standing around me, still holding their rum mugs between the bar and their lips as they stared, open-mouthed, down on my recumbent form. I looked through the doorway and saw feathery palms, and moonlit seas softly beating over the coral reefs of a strange shore.
“It looks as though I’ve fallen on another world,” thought I. But no such luck for me! The fact of the case is this. Our ship, from Honolulu, had arrived off the Fiji Islands that evening. I was with O’Hara, whom I had re-met in Hawaii. And, in my hurry to get ashore, I had hired a canoe, and whilst I was being paddled ashore, the canoe had turned turtle! It appeared that I had sunk twice beneath the water before O’Hara and the native boatmen rescued me. They thought I was done for when they dragged me up the shore and carried me into the grog-shanty.
The native bar-keeper had gone off immediately to fetch a well-known Fijian medicine-man who dwelt in Tumba-Tumba village. What on earth the medicine-man did before he succeeded in restoring my heart-beats, I don’t know. O’Hara swore that he delivered mighty blows on my hips with a flat war-club, lifted me repeatedly up to the shanty’s roof by one leg and let me drop with a crash! The native doctor was evidently cruel to be kind, for his strange acts saved my life, and were the direct cause of the strange sensations and my experience as above recorded.