From Place to Place

torekeeper for the British Great Eastern Company, Ltd., on Good Friday Island, in the South Seas, is not our

returned travellers to those parts have from time to time told me. So if in this small chronicle those paragraphs which purport to be of a descriptive nature appear incomplete to readers personally acquainted with the spots dealt with or with spots like them the fau

room into which his housekeeping quarters opened was a store of sorts where he retailed print goods staple, tinned foods assorted and gimcracks various to his customers, these mostly being natives. The building was crowned with a tin roof and on top of the roof there perched a round water tank, like a high hat on a head much too large for it. The use of thi

the nut of the coconut palm. So rich is it in oils that soap makers-to cite one of the industries employing it-scarce could do without it; but like many of this earth's most profitable and desirable yieldings it has its unpretty aspects. For one thing

e straddlebug handcars. Because the water offshore was shoal ships could not come in very close but must lie well out in the lagoon and their unloadings and their reloadings were carried on by means of whale-boats ferrying back and forth between ship side and dock side with the push cars to facilitate

s ache; and the buildings referred to were built of blocks of white coral like exaggerated cubes of refined sugar. These buildings were the chapels and churches-Methodist, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, English Wesleyan and American Mormon. When the sun shone clear the water on beyond became a shimmering blazing shield of white-hot metal; and an hour of uninterrupted gazing upon it would have turned an argus into a b

ead hidden under its wing, its rump up-reared and its splayed tail feathers saluting the skies. Viewed together they made a spectacle for which nothing in the temperate zones, animal or vegetable, offers a measurable comparison. When the wind blew softly the trees whispered among themselves. When the wind blew hard and furiou

had come to be his most dependable stand-bys in the matter of provender. True the natives brought him gifts of food dishes; dishes cooked without salt and pleasing to the Polynesian palate. Coming out upon his balcony of a morning he would find swinging from a cross-b

ooner than some white men had; and almost from the first the mere sight and savour of a soft-fleshed baked fis

had dried the nut meats to the proper brownish tone, there rose and spread upon the air a stench so thick and so heavy as to be almost visible; a rancid, hot, rottenish stench. Then, when the wind blew off the seas it frequently brought with it the taint of rotted fish. Sniffing this smell Ethan Pratt w

ore bloodthirsty than Uhlans. After dark the flame of his kerosene lamp was to them as the traditional light in the traditional casement is to returning wanderers. It brought them in millions, and with them tiny persistent gnats and many small coffin-shaped beetles and hosts of pulpy, unwholesome-looking moths of many sizes and as many colours. Screens and double screens at the window openings did not avail to keep these visitors out. Somehow they

ong on purposeless flights. Still other insects, unseen but none the less busy, added to the burden of his jeremiad. Borers riddled the page

istness and stickiness. If he took a nap in the afternoon he rose from it as from a Turkish bath. His hair was plastered to his head all day with dampness; his forehead and his face ran sweat; his wrists were as thou

d as though woodchoppers were at work far off in its depths; and a constant insane chattering sound, as though mad children, hidden all about him, were laughing at him. Dusk brought from their coverts the flying foxes, to utter curious notes as they sailed through the gloaming, and occasionally sharp squeaks as of mortal agony or intense gratific

ne was almost sure to bark one's shanks on the poisoned coral, making sores that refused to heal. Against the river, which flowed down out of the interior to the sea, Pratt likewise bore a grudge, because it was in the river that a brown woman

om remote stations on the farther side of his own island, for Good Friday Island had but one port of entry and this was it. Beachcombers who had been adopted into village

e surest of winning an asylum and wives and tribal equality. To Pratt it seems to have been a source of wonderment that almost without exception they were blue-eyed and light-ha

uld be in clean pyjama suits with bright-coloured neckties. Ordinarily these latter went about bare-headed, bare-legged and bare-bodied except for the lava-lava made of fibre from the paper mulberry tree and worn like a kilt about the hips; but now,

or you should know that in all things he was most typical of what is most typical in a certain cross-section of New England life-not the coastwise New England of a seafaring, far-ranging, adventurous race, but the New England of long-settled remote interior districts. He came of a farming stock and a storekeeping stock,

surroundings excepting those among which he had been born and in which he intended to end his days. Temperamentally he was of a fast colour. The leopard cannot change the spots and ne

ts voluptuous colour and abandon, its prodigally glorious dawns and its velvety nights-held for him no value to be reckoned as an offset against climatic discomforts; it left him untouched. In it he never saw the wonderland that Ste

ermans with their flaming red and yellow beards, their thick-lensed spectacles, their gross manners when among their own kind and their brutishness in all their dealings with the natives-a brutishness so universal among them that no Polynesian would work at any price for a German, and every

l were to him as completely strangers as they had been on the day he landed in this place. Set down in the midst of a teeming fecundity he nevertheless remained as truly a castaway

ed might have taken joy, merely bored him unutterably. As for the native women, they had as little of sex appeal for him as he had for them-which was saying a good deal now, because he

nt runty, mean-figured, undersized. A graceful girl, her naked limbs glistening with coconut oil, a necklet of flowers about her throat and a hibiscus bloom pasted to her cheek like a beauty spot, meeting him in the road would give him a derisive

ored him; the girls who derided him; the beachcombers who nauseated him; the white sands, the blue waters, the smells, the sounds, the routine of existence with one day precisely like another-the whole thing of it. We may picture him as a humid duck-legged little man, most terribly homesick, most tremendously lonely, mo

short season of excitement, most agreeable to their natures. For the whites it meant a fleeting but none the less delectable contact with the worl

tales of great events on this continent or in that archipelago, but because it brought to him a sheaf of letters, all addressed in the same prim handwriting and bearing the same postmark; and a sheaf of copies of the South New Medford Daily Republican. The letters he read at once greedily, but with the n

manager for the British Great Eastern he had indulged himself in a perfect orgy of reading. He had read all his Daily Republicans in two days' time, gorging himself on hom

oever strong-the desire to know how the divorce trial of the H. K. Peabodys turned out, the itch of yearning to learn whether the body of the man found drowned in Exeter Pond was identified-proved potent enough to pull him away from his rule. That the news he read was anywhere from ten weeks to four months old when it reached h

es had blotched them. His breakfast he prepared himself, afterward washing the dishes. Then he would light his pipe or his cigar and take from the shelf the uppermost copy of the pile of Daily Republicans there. With the love for tidiness and kemptness that was a part of him he wo

spondence-no line of its contents did he skip. With his eyes shut he could put his finger upon those advertisements which ran without change and occupied set places on this page or that; such, for instance, as the two-column display of J. Wesley Paxon, Livery Barn, Horses Kept and Baited, Vehicles at all hours, Funeral Attendance a Specialty; and the two-inch notice of the American Pantorium and Pressing Club, Membershi

y chapter in a bulky letter, the whole to be posted on the next steamer day. It was characteristic of the man that in his letter writing he customarily dealt in comment upon the minor affairs of South New Medford as they had passed in review before him in the printed columns, rather than in obser

of a special conjury residing in these waking dreams of his, the little man peering nearsightedly at the shimmering white beach saw instead of a beach the first heavy fall of snow upon the withers of the Green Mountains; saw not unchanging stretches of sand but a blanket of pu

ng upon the settlement where he lived, set as it was like a white-and-green jewel in a ring of lush barbaric beauty, his fancy showed him the vista of a spinsterish-looking Main Street lined by dooryards having fences of poi

, like Yankee militiamen on a muster day. And night times, when through his windows there came floating in the soft vowelsome voices of native fishermen paddling their canoes upon the lagoon and si

ce the airs the fishermen chanted were based, nearly all, upon Christian songs that the earlier missionaries had brought hithe

the peaceful safe harbour of South New Medford, anchored fast by his heartstrings to a small white cottage, all furbished and plenished within, all flowers and shrubs roundabout, with a kitchen gar

s mind's eye he followed his own course in a buggy along a country road in the fall of the year when the maples had turned and the goldenrod spread its carpet of tawny glo

er wavering, through all the days of his faring into far and foreign parts. Since childhood the two of them had been engaged. It was she who wrote him the letters that came, a fat sheaf of them, by every steamer; it was to her that he wrote in reply. It was for the sake of her and in the intention of making a home for her that through four years he had endured this i

verlasting farewell to these hated islands and go sailing home-home to South New Medford and to Miss Hetty Stowe. And then she would surrender the pla

meant more, even, than letters and papers. To him it was a renewal of the nearing prospect of an eternal departure out of these lands. By the steamer's movements he marked off into spaced intervals the remaining period of his exile, he though

the lagoon. In a canoe with a brown man to paddle him Pratt put off for her. He was alongside by the time her anchor chains had rattled out, and the skipper with his own

ted fifty-odd. On the other hand there seemed to be a fairly complete file of the papers, except that about ten or twelve of the earlier-dated numbers were missing. By some freakishness in the handling of the post at this port or that a batch of the older papers and a large

intly breathing as they did the restrained affections of a woman no longer young and coming of a breed of women who almost from the cradle are by precept and example taught how to cloak the deeper and the more constant emotions beneath

n brought the topmost copy of his just-received file of news

ody's drug store; of a fire from unknown causes in Lawyer Horace Bartlett's offices upstairs over G. A. R. Hall, damage eighty dollars; of the death of Aunt Priscilla Lyon, aged ninety-two; of a bouncing, ten-pound boy

it burned into his brain like a fiery

nnes. We did not get the name of the officiating minister. The bride is an estimable lady who for years past has taught District School Number Four in the county. We have not the pleasure of the ha

down in ruins. So this, then was why the sequence of letters had been so abruptly broken off. She had lacked the courage to tell him of her faithless

For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeles

micry of the name the native girls had for him-"Pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh," over and over again repeated. Beyond his doorstep the life of the st

through the deliberate act of his hands, would go forth from the body, doomed to everlasting torment. It did not appear feasible to him that God might understand. The God he belie

n of it. He knew how to load and fire and clean it. Occasionally he had used it in shooting at wood pigeons. He went inside and took it from its place and charged it with black powder from an old-fashioned metal powder f

brought the hammer back to full cock and fixed a cap upon the nipple. He stood the gun upright upon the floor and leaned forward, the muzzle again

up and before the store had been put under lock and key, the white men made search about the place for any farewell message, or lacking that, any physical evidence that might furnish a possible explanation for the cause of the suicide. They found neither message

eading that he found upon the two surfaces of the fragment. On one side appeared part of an advertisem

epting the report in good faith, this paper printed it in good faith, as an item of news. We now learn that the entire story was untrue, being, not to mince words, a lie manufactured out of the whole cloth. We learn that Miss Stowe knows the gentleman whose name was given as bridegroom but very slightly, having met him but once, as we are now reliably informed. In fact, nothing could be farther from her thoughts than marriage with the gentleman in question, he being considerably her junior in years. The cruelty of the hoax

agment was

om contemplation of a strange contradiction in our modern life, to wit: That