and gave him a
cigar. The skipper volunteered a little information.

"I got in last night, but I couldn't find the opening, so I had to
anchor outside. I never been this run before, but my people had some
stuff they wanted to bring over here. Gray, d'you know him?"

"Yes, he's got a store a little way along."

"Well, there was a lot of canned stuff that he wanted over, an' he's got
some copra. They thought I might just as well come over as lie idle at
Apia. I run between Apia and Pago-Pago mostly, but they've got smallpox
there just now, and there's nothing stirring."

He took a drink of his whisky and lit a cigar. He was a taciturn man,
but there was something in Neilson that made him nervous, and his
nervousness made him talk. The Swede was looking at him with large dark
eyes in which there was an expression of faint amusement.

"This is a tidy little place you've got here."

"I've done my best with it."

"You must do pretty well with your trees. They look fine. With copra at
the price it is now. I had a bit of a plantation myself once, in Upolu
it was, but I had to sell it."

He looked round the room again, where all those books gave him a feeling
of something incomprehensible and hostile.

"I guess you must find it a bit lonesome here though," he said.

"I've got used to it. I've been here for twenty-five years."

Now the captain could think of nothing more to say, and he smoked in
silence. Neilson had apparently no wish to break it. He looked at his
guest with a meditative eye. He was a tall man, more than six feet high,
and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little
purple veins on the cheeks, and his features were sunk into its fatness.
His eyes were bloodshot. His neck was buried in rolls of fat. But for a
fringe of long curly hair, nearly white, at the back of his head, he was
quite bald; and that immense, shiny surface of forehead, which might
have given him a false look of intelligence, on the contrary gave him
one of peculiar imbecility. He wore a blue flannel shirt, open at the
neck and showing his fat chest covered with a mat of reddish hair, and a
very old pair of blue serge trousers. He sat in his chair in a heavy
ungainly attitude, his great belly thrust forward and his fat legs
uncrossed. All elasticity had gone from his limbs. Neilson wondered idly
what sort of man he had been in his youth. It was almost impossible to
imagine that this creature of vast bulk had ever