CHAPTER XXIII.
Bloody Bill--Dark surmises--A strange sail, and a strange crew, and a still stranger cargo--New reasons for favouring missionaries--A murderous massacre, and thoughts thereon.
Three weeks after the conversation narrated in the last chapter, I was standing on the quarter-deck of the schooner watching the gambols of a shoal of porpoises that swam round us.

It was a dead calm.

One of those still, hot, sweltering days, so common in the Pacific, when Nature seems to have gone to sleep, and the only thing in water or in air that proves her still alive, is her long, deep breathing, in the swell of the mighty sea.

No cloud floated in the deep blue above; no ripple broke the reflected blue below.

The sun shone fiercely in the sky, and a ball of fire blazed, with almost equal power, from out the bosom of the water.