"The two or three dozen surviving cases of this remarkable vintage were snapped up the moment they were clear of the customs by Spencer's New York agent, who rushed them on to San Francisco. All but two cases, which were kept out to serve at the Spencers' farewell dinner, were sent aboard the yacht and stowed.
"I saw at once that the old chap was worried when I arrived the evening of the dinner, and before we went in he took me aside to ask if I knew anything regarding the handling of 'high-power' wine, as he termed it. It appeared that in the afternoon, while several bottles of the new wine were in the refrigerator undergoing a preliminary cooling, some one had dropped an ice pick in amongst them and they had all gone off together. The frame of the box held, but the partitions gave way, wrecking, beyond possibility of salvage, two dozen ice cream models of the Aphrodite floating in a sea of green jelly. The Aphrodites were replaced by some ready-made anchors which the caterer chanced to have on hand, but the endeavour to hasten the chilling of more champagne by the use of a whirligig freezer only resulted in the annihilation of that useful contrivance and the loss of another bottle of wine.
"The contents of the first two bottles which the butler opened for dinner got away to the ceiling almost as fast as did the gilt-capped corks, and that worthy was about ready to give up in despair when one of the caterer's men pointed the way to a solution of the immediate problem by setting the next bottle in a punchbowl and capping it with an inverted soup plate. The latter was smashed to smithereens at the first trial, but the aluminum stew pan which replaced it at the next attempt stood the shock and deflected the cork, cap and a considerable quantity of a restless yellow liquid to the bottom of the punchbowl. This liquid, by means of a funnel, was restored to its bottle, hastily muffling which in a napkin to restrain a persistent catarrhal tendency of its nose, the flurried butler, fifteen minutes late, dashed into the dining room with the first installment of the anxiously-awaited 'Sunshine.'
"Now it is just possible that had the butler moved with his wonted glide of easy dignity nothing very much out of the ordinary would have happened; but the stiff, broken-kneed trot with which he tried to make up for lost time aroused the dormant energies of the hard-won contents of the bottle, with the result that it gathered itself together and made a fresh break for the open just as its warder was edging in for a gingerly pour at the glass of a pearly-shouldered dowager who was sitting on Spencer's right. There was no inverted aluminum stew pan to deflect the erupting 'Sunshine' this time, and, as a consequence, it expended itself with one joyous 'whouf' upon the well-kept surfaces of the stately dame's right cheek and shoulder. Some little of it, tinged with rose and pearl, caromed off to extinguish a circle of pink candles on the table, but the most of it remained behind to trickle in little rose and pearl rivulets down the lady's neck. The unfortunate victim screamed lustily several times, dabbed wildly at the parts affected with a little yellow rag which suddenly appeared from nowhere, and then ran, sobbing, from the room.
"In the meantime the butler's assistants had rounded him up another bottle of the elusive fluid, and when that functionary appeared again in the dining room he might have been planting dynamite bombs, so carefully did he pick his way about and so great was the expression of terror in his staring eyes. But he stuck gamely to his task and finally poured out the last of the 'Sunshine' that his improvised distillery was able to deliver without again interfering with the toilet of any of the guests.
"In all of this time not a soul was able to get a sip of the phantom liquid. The moment a trickle of it touched a glass it hissed like a moistened seidlitz powder, threw spray in the air and piled up a heap of bubbles which, quickly subsiding, left nothing behind but a drug-store smell and a damp circle of table cloth. The sprightly brunette in her first season whom I had taken in came nearest to getting a drink, and her experience had a dampening effect upon the enthusiasm of the others. This maid was rash and impulsive, and, partly by quickness of hand, partly by inhalation, she managed to deflect laterally a lungful of the pungent spray which was ascending perpendicularly to bespangle with dewy drops what some one had just characterized in nautical parlance as her 'natty gaff topsail pompadour.' Her behaviour for the next minute or two made the efforts of the plump dowager to staunch the flow of her complexion seem dignified in comparison. The dinner was finished up with a more manageable vintage, and next day the Aphrodite sailed without further requisition having been made upon her stores of 'Extra Spry.'
"All through the three weeks' cruise to Tahiti the restless bubbles in the thick, green bottles in the Aphrodite's starboard lockers elbowed each other as they swelled in the tropic heat, but it was not until the yacht was safely anchored in Papeete harbour that another opportunity came for any of them to get beyond control. A call had been made on the French governor in the morning, and that dignitary, according to official etiquette, was returning the visit in company with his stately wife the afternoon of the same day. Doubtless you had to go through the same thing. The trouble came while the hospitable Spencer was mixing a punch. Cold tea, maraschino, curacao, burnt sugar and a lot of other stuff had already gone in as a base, quite enough, so the mixer thought, to dilute a bottle of his 'Extra Spry' to an exhilarant innocuousness. All might have gone well had the diluting been done upon scientific principles, but Spencer, whose knowledge of hydraulics appeared very rudimentary for a man who had made a fortune in placer mining, directed the Japanese steward to poke the nose of the bottle into the punch as soon as he started the cork. That obedient functionary approached the bowl from the side opposite to the one on which the governor and his wife were seated and did exactly as directed.
"Although the time was but five in the afternoon, His Excellency was in the full evening dress prescribed for official calls—cock-hat, claw-hammer coat and two feet of shirt front crossed with a strip of red, white and blue bunting and a row and a half of medals. A hundredth of a second after the asthmatically-wheezing nose of the bottle of 'Extra Spry' went over the edge of the bowl this regalia was absorbing a good half of Spencer's partially mixed punch, while the remainder bubbled and creamed over the expensive Parisian creation of his stately wife.
"A sailor, who had taken in the incident from the forward deck, lost control of himself and broke into a loud guffaw, in which he was promptly joined by several of his mates. This set two or three of the more irreverent of the members of Spencer's party going, and when the spasm of laughter had passed it was found that Their Excellencies, in high dudgeon, had melted over the side and departed in their waiting cutter. The Jap was found at the foot of the cabin stairs with a bruise in the pit of his stomach which bade fair to confine him to the little French hospital for a fortnight. Tropical heat and the agitation of the tossing bosom of the South Pacific were conspiring to set on hair-trigger edge the latent energies of the 'Extra Spry,' and, though none suspected it, the insistent throb of the imprisoned bubbles were the pulse beats in the Hand of Fate.
"The coldness of Tahiti officialdom after this incident, a squabble with his skipper, as well as incipient internal dissensions among the members of his too-closely-confined party, all conspired to make Spencer forego the remainder of the cruise he had planned, and within the next week or so they had all left for San Francisco or Auckland, leaving the Aphrodite in my hands to be sold to the highest bidder. At the end of a month I sold her to the Amalgamated Missionary, Bible and Tract Society, which eagerly embraced the opportunity to replace at a bargain figure its schooner, Morning Star, which the last hurricane had piled up, a hopeless wreck, upon the beach of Moorea. I was retained as skipper.