A Launch Came Off To Us; In It Were Members Of The Hawaiian Yacht
Club, Come To Greet Us And Make Us Welcome, With True Hawaiian
Hospitality, To All They Had.
They were ordinary men, flesh and
blood and all the rest; but they did not tend to break our
Dreaming.
Our last memories of men were of United States marshals and of
panicky little merchants with rusty dollars for souls, who, in a
reeking atmosphere of soot and coal-dust, laid grimy hands upon the
Snark and held her back from her world adventure. But these men who
came to meet us were clean men. A healthy tan was on their cheeks,
and their eyes were not dazzled and bespectacled from gazing
overmuch at glittering dollar-heaps. No, they merely verified the
dream. They clinched it with their unsmirched souls.
So we went ashore with them across a level flashing sea to the
wonderful green land. We landed on a tiny wharf, and the dream
became more insistent; for know that for twenty-seven days we had
been rocking across the ocean on the tiny Snark. Not once in all
those twenty-seven days had we known a moment's rest, a moment's
cessation from movement. This ceaseless movement had become
ingrained. Body and brain we had rocked and rolled so long that
when we climbed out on the tiny wharf kept on rocking and rolling.
This, naturally, we attributed to the wharf. It was projected
psychology. I spraddled along the wharf and nearly fell into the
water.
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