"'Brrr—in a mysterious way—brrr,' came the droning answer, leaving us no wiser than before.
"The jolt of the mate's weary body had thrown over the half-shifted lever of the already wound-up gramophone, which had been abandoned on the transom by Loveworth when he turned to receive the first onslaught of Boraki's henchmen, and the record had commenced to spin. The sounding-box floundered like a squirrel on its wheel as the black disc, scarred and littered from the explosion, whirled beneath the needle, and it chanced that the only intelligible words that came from the horn in the first few moments were those which the astonished mate had, for an instant, taken as answers to his conjectures.
"After learning that the deed had been done in a mysterious way, all we could make out between the 'zrrrs' and 'bzzzs' which followed was that whoever had done the deed had performed wonders, to which the mate naïvely replied that he had perceived as much at the outset, but that now he was seeking enlightenment as to how the wonders had been performed.
"The needle steeple-chased for a couple of circuits after that without communicating anything relevant, following which, suddenly and without warning, it came out of the woods onto a stretch of smooth, undamaged going. Then, in the clear, flute-like tenor of 'Harry McMurtry, Columbophone Record,' came the words of Loveworth's favourite hymn—
'God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.'
"The missionary, who was kneeling on the beach invoking a blessing on the heads of the terrified wretches who had come pouring from their houses to grovel at his feet, told me afterwards that the words came floating down to him across the still waters of the lagoon like a voice from the other world.
"That was all the comment that the only English-speaking witness of the miracle wrought by 'Hum's Extra Spry' was destined ever to make, for at the beginning of the next lap the needle went into an incipient crack and split the record down the middle. The two pieces, together with the scarred fragments of a cast iron top hat, are still preserved by Loveworth in the little coral mission at Makatea."
The green bottle on Carew's chair arm had been tilted with increasing frequency as his story approached its climax, and for the last fifteen or twenty minutes, save for short spells when he had rallied to explain this or that phenomenon, he had talked with a far-away expression in his eyes, as one who visualizes and describes what he sees. He roused somewhat at the ripple of applause which greeted the end of the yarn, but he made his adieux like a man in a dream, and his gaze was blank and vacant as he lurched unsteadily down the gangway to the Clio's launch.
That was the last we ever saw of the Honourable "Slope" Carew. He sailed next day in the Clio to pilot that gunboat to an unmarked rock somewhere to the north-west which was to be blown up or charted. A year later, while in Australia, I read in a Noumea dispatch to the Sydney Morning Herald that he had shot himself on the lawn of the Cercle Militaire in a fit of melancholia following a night of absinthe drinking.