him. Its gorgeous physical
beauty, its languor, its 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 Stevenson made so
vivid to stay-at-homes, nor felt for one instant the thrill that
inspired Jack London to fine rhapsodising. In it he saw and he felt only
the sense of an everlasting struggle against foreign elements and
hostile forces.

Among the missionaries he had acquaintances but no friends. He despised
the swaggering beachcombers who had flung off the decencies of
civilisation along with the habiliments of civilisation and who found a
marrowy sweetness in the husks of the prodigal. Even more he despised
the hectoring Germans 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 German had to depend for his plantation
labour upon imported black boys from the Solomons and from New Guinea,
who having once been trapped or, to use the trade word, indented, were
thereafter held in an enforced servitude and paid with the bond-man's
wage of bitter bread and bloody stripes.

He had never been able to get under the skin of a native; indeed he had
never tried. In all the things that go to make up an understanding of a
fellow mortal's real nature they still 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 as though he had floated ashore on a bit of wreckage. He could
have been no more and no less a maroon had the island which received him
been a desert island instead of a populous one.

When a chief paid him a formal visit, bringing a gift of taro root and
sitting for hours upon his veranda, the grave courtesy of the ceremony,
in which a white man differently constituted 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 was short and of a meagre shape, and the scorn of
the Polynesian girl for a little man is measureless. The girls of Good
Friday Island called him