balanced for a second on the crest of a distant wave, and returned after many anxious hours, when we wondered whether boat and ship would ever meet again. To men in an open boat 1,500 miles from land, it is no laughing matter to see one's ship disappearing, as if sunk into one of the foam-dappled valleys of the sea.

By this means nearly 50 albatrosses of four species were collected, including one of the large snowy variety; several spectacled ones or mollymawks, and more than a score of the yellow-nosed, with a blaze of chrome down the top of their dark bills.

One of the commoner wandering albatrosses, caught from the deck with hook and line, was banded, on the chance that some other ship might recapture it. In a bottle on its neck we placed a brief history of that famous bird mentioned by Dr. Frank M. Chapman, which was bottled December 8, 1847, by the whaler Euphrates in latitude 43° S., longitude 148° 40′ W., and recovered 12 days later,

3.400 miles away, by the famous whaler Cachelot, at 45° 50' S. and 78° 27′ W.

BIRDS TOO BIG FOR A LITTLE SHIP

The "stuffed" albatross specimens were so large that we faced a serious storage problem. The difficulty was solved by swinging on deck a huge whaling cask and packing the birds in it. John, with his cask tools and dried flag leaves, headed the cask and made it water-tight for storage in the damp hold of the ship. One of our crew, an ex-rumrunner, suggested we might finance another expedition by inserting several bottles of Scotch or a magnum of champagne into each albatross before sewing it up.

But Cuyler and I were less interested in the present or future contents of the albatross skins than we had been in the meat which they once contained. Not only had we slain the albatross and skinned it into the bargain, but we had eaten it. In the absence of fresh meats aboard, we jumped at the chance to fry small cutlets from the breast of the Ancient Mar

iner's bird, and we found them so delicious that we tried stews, hashes, chili con carne, and even braised and boiled albatross. The meat was tender and well flavored, and especially tempting was the breast of the yellow-nosed variety. Gourmets may envy.

The crew, however, could never get over its superstition and repugnance at the thought of eating the albatross. They ate their salt meats and dried fish and pitied us.

Thus did we sail for more than a month in the direction of the southern tip of Africa; then turned northward around

30° S., and along the path of the old clipper ships and the East Indiamen, rolling down. toward the island of St. Helena.

AN EMPEROR'S ISLAND OF EXILE

Early one morning we stood on the deck of our easily rolling craft, feet spread to meet the swing of the quartering seas, and saw the mistenshrouded mountains and heights of St. Helena materialize through openings in the morning's curtain of haze. Bleak, bare, upstanding it was, as we approached it under shortened canvas. "What a terrible place to be sent to for a number of years!" exclaimed one of our officers.

He had scarcely spoken when the sun. broke through and the whole top of the island appeared blanketed with a green whose varying shades indicated brush, bush, and forest scattered sparsely over cultivated and well-grazed

plateaus and mountain tops.

"It appears very interesting to me," said Vanzetti, our Venetian navigator. "I had not realized that there was so much green on top of the island. I wonder if that is Longwood, Napoleon's home, there on the high northern end of the island?" (p. 55).

Tiny gray and white specks, perched on a lofty, verdant plateau, resolved into small houses and outbuildings, under the power of the ship's glasses. Even the sailors wanted to bend over the chart outspread on the cabin roof, to identify Flagstaff Hill, 2,290 feet high; Halley's Mount, 2,467 feet, where Edmund Halley

the crest of the island, a semicircular sweep 2,700 feet above the sea, once the rim of a gigantic crater, which blew out toward the sea and left a beautiful valley, the Sandy Bay country, on the windward side of St. Helena (page 57).

It is impossible from the sea to distinguish the three classic summits of this ridge, but we were to find on climbing them that Diana's Peak is higher than either Cuckold or Acteon.

AN ISLAND WITH ITS OWN HISTORY

What an enchanting place to be situated so far out in the South Atlantic, as if forgotten-a Flying Dutchman of an island, which many have seen from the decks of passing ships, but at which few ever touch! It is indeed a lovely emerald among the bewildering jewels of the British Crown, with a history all its own. Green, fertile, lovely, and capped by the peak of Diana the Huntress, it stands in splendid isolation, sur

BIG SHIPS

rounded by forbidding cliffs which rise a thousand feet above a fisherman's paradise.

It was a hundred years after the memorable first voyage of Columbus that Englishmen learned of the great wealth to be derived from the India trade; and here, on the island of St. Helena, in 1651, the English East India Company established its great way station. By charter from Charles II in 1661, the company assumed a control over the island which lasted for nearly two centuries. The island plantations were cultivated with

slave labor; and fresh vegetables and meat animals were provided for the ships which touched here on the voyages between England and India.

The monopoly of the Indian trade by the East India Company was abolished in 1813, with the result that there was a sudden growth of shipping and competition. The China tea clippers, queens of the oceans, began to touch at the island for supplies as they raced home from the typhoon seas.

For six years St. Helena was the home of the exiled Napoleon, who was brought

to the island in 1815 and died at Longwood, on a wind-swept, tree-dotted plateau, in 1821. The shaded Glen of Silence opened to receive his body and held it until 1840, when it was removed to the magnificent mausoleum on the banks of the Seine (see page 54).

We landed at Jamestown, just a village, but the only settlement on the entire island worthy the name. Three or four hundred men, six or seven hundred women, and so many children that they get under foot and are counted four or five times, swell the population to nearly two thousand. Quite different from the usual island youngsters are the children of St. Helena. Shyly they eye the visitor, never importuning him in whining note for coin of the realm (see, also, page 55).

The people of St. Helena tell you that anything will grow on the lovely green slopes of their gentle upland hills, and you may well believe them when you learn that more than a thousand species of flowering plants have been recorded from the island.

The ring-necked pheasant is fairly common and a few red-legged partridges oc

cur on grassy slopes; the St. Helena plover, found nowhere else in the world, cousin of a West African species, we met in considerable numbers on wiregrass pastures, and the New South Wales ground dove is fairly familiar, especially about Jamestown. In the trees of the island we saw numerous Napoleon birds or wax-billed weavers, South African seed-eaters, Madagascar cardinal weavers, Java sparrows, and myna birds.

"We've got the best place in the world to live," the St. Helena people say. They know it, though few have seen any other place.

Many middle-aged people born in Jamestown, deep in its narrow valley by the sea, have never journeyed even so far as the several miles of good road leading to Napoleon's tomb and his home at Longwood. Once an aged man, born and reared to manhood in the beautiful, green half-crater of the Sandy Bay country, on the opposite side of the island from Jamestown, was finally taken to the break of James Valley, 700 feet above the village housetops. He caught his breath and said: