There also would be present a party of overseers and managers from a big
German plantation on an adjacent island. The traders and the Germans
would appear in white ducks with white shoes smartly pipe-clayed, and
white straw hats. The beachcombers would 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, in white men's garments, they sought to prove that they
still were white men and civilised white men too. If the steamer were
late, as very often happened, some of the visitors would take advantage
of the wait to make themselves roaring drunk on gin.

So much briefly, for the stage setting of Ethan Pratt's environment; now
for the personality of the man: Of all the breeds and the mixed breeds
that have gravitated out of white lands into these sea islands of
darker-skinned peoples, there surely was never a more incongruous, more
alien figure than this man presented. For 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, bred out of the loins of forbears made hard by the
task of chiselling a livelihood off of flinty hillsides, made narrow by
the pent-up communal system of isolated life, made honest and truthful
by the influences behind them and the examples before them of
generations of straight-walking, strait-laced, God-dreading folk.

That form of moral dyspepsia known as the Puritanical conscience was his
by right of inheritance. In his nature there was no flexibility, no
instinct for harmonious adaptability to any 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 neither could he change his; nor did he will so to do. In
short he was what he was, just as God and prenatal reactions had
fashioned him, and so he would remain to the end of the chapter.

For all the four years he had spent out there the lure of the South
Seas--about which so much has been written that it must be a verity and
not a popular myth--had never laid hold upon