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Then and there I determined that some day I would myself sail those adventurous seas in a vessel of my own, that I would poke the nose of my craft up steaming tropic rivers, that I would drop anchor off towns whose names could not be found on ordinary maps, and that I would go ashore in white linen and pipe-clayed shoes and a sun-hat to take tiffin with sultans and rajahs, and to barter beads and brass wire for curios a curly-bladed Malay kris, carved cocoanuts, a shark's-tooth necklace, a blow-gun with its poisoned darts, a stuffed bird of paradise, and, of course, a huge conch-shell and an enormous piece of branch-coral which I would bring home and display to admiring relatives and friends as convincing proofs of where I had been.
The fine old doorway, brass-knockered, arched by a spray of crimson rambler, was flanked on one hand by a great conch-shell, on the other by an enormous specimen of branch-coral, thus subtly intimating to passers-by that the owner of the house had been in "foreign parts."
He stormed and scolded, dragged me off the pony for my hands and feet were numb with cold took the bridle, and went off at a rapid stride, so that I had to run to keep them in sight in the darkness, for we were off the road in a thicket of scrub, looking like white branch-coral, I knew not where.
In passing from island to island we had many opportunities of observing the different formation and shape of several species of coral; some stood in masses of the brain-stone and cockscomb coral, some like petrified sponge, some like fans, some again of the branch-coral interlaced and intertwined in every direction; again, some broad flat masses lying layer over layer, like huge sea-lichens, again many presented the appearance of a fungus or great sea-mushroom, with a broad-spreading head springing from a small thick base.
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