Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories / 1898

the only white man on the island, left his house on the edge of the lagoon, and

e brown women called out a word or two of greeting to the child, and smiled and beckoned her to leave her father for an instant and take the fruit or piece of cooked breadfruit that they held out to her with their brown hands. But only a solemn shake of t

impassive face, the white man would sit for long hours staring moodily out upon the

olemnity with such pebbles and light shells as lay within the reach of her little hands. Perhaps, if the tide was heavy and at its flood, and a breaker heavier than the rest breached shorewards in a white wall of seething foam, and crashed and rattled together the loose coral slabs that marked the line of high-water mark, the sile

so small, that if it but touched thy feet thou wouldst be swept away like as a leaf in a strong wind. So stay thee here beside me, sweet one," and

one of m

-line of surf, as the canoes from Matakatea would round the point, each one with a flaming torch of dried palm-leaves held high

she could see the bronzed, half-naked figures of the paddlers, and the bright gleam and shimmer of the fish as they were swept up by the deadly net, and hear the warning cry from th

of island melody died away, and the paddlers looked shoreward to the motionless figure of Prout, wh

child, and the latter would wave her hand and smile back, while her father, as if awakened from a dream, called out, in the island tongue, the customary "May your fishing to-night

line, and swept quickly down upon the island and drenched the loose, sandy soil with pouring showers, the white man had sat with his

t landed among the people of Nukutavau, had been t