Page:Barbour--Lost island.djvu/242

 force, and a pair of cotton trousers rolled above his knees. Back on one of his beloved islands, where there was no coal to shovel into greedy furnaces and where time was a word that had almost ceased to have any meaning, he was fast reverting to nature. He looked like a person whose highest ambition would be to lie on his back and bask in the sunshine for ever and ever.

As the gull seemed to disappear in the burning sun Jim turned round slowly with a lazy smile.

"More than all the other things in the world, um?" he repeated, looking at Tempest, who nodded.

"One time," Jim said with quaint gravity, "I sailed on a big ship round Cape Horn to a place where all the ships come from, bigger 'n Manila, bigger 'n Iquique, called Hobroken."

"Hobroken?" Tempest queried, wrinkling his brows in perplexity. "Where in the name of fortune is that?"