rific crashing sound fit to wake the dead and to stun the living.

Living there Pratt's diet was mainly tinned salmon, which tasted faintly
of tin and strongly of copra; and along with the salmon, crackers, which
in this climate were almost always flabby with dampness and often were
afflicted with greenish mould. Salmon and crackers 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-beam a basket made of the
green palm leaves and containing a chicken or a fish prepared according
to the primitive native recipe, or perhaps a mess of wild greens baked
on hot stones; or maybe baked green bananas or taro or yams or hard
crusty halves of baked breadfruit.

To the white man yams and taro taste mighty good at first, but
eventually he sickens of them. Pratt sickened sooner than some white men
had; and almost from the first the mere sight and savour of a
soft-fleshed baked fish had made his gorge rise in revolt. So he fell
back upon staples of his own land and ate salmon and crackers.

This island where he lived was an island of smells and insects. Consider
first the matter of the prevalent smells: When the copra was curing and
the village green was studded with thousands of little cusps, each being
brown without and milk-white within, and each destined to remain there
until the heat 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 would pray for a land breeze; but
since he hated perfumed smells almost as intensely as he hated
putrescent ones, a land breeze was no treat to his nose either, for it
came freighted with the sickish odour of the frangipane and of a plant
the islanders call _mosooi_, overpowering in their combined sweetness.

In his letters he complained much of these smells and likewise much of
the heat, but more than of either he complained of the insects. It would
appear that the mosquitoes worked on him in shifts. By day there came
day mosquitoes, creatures of the sunlight and matching it in a way,
seeing that they were big grey-striped fellows with ke