you haven't house-room enough for 'em all, or what?"

The trader stroked his bushy sandy beard, with a rough brown hand, and
his clear grey eyes looked steadily into those of the captain.

"I'm no the man to marry any native girl, Captain Packenham. When I do
marry any one it will be the girl who promised hersel' to me five years
ago in Aberdeen. But there, I'm no quick to tak' offence at a bit of
fun. And I want ye two tae help me to do a guid deed. I want ye tae come
ashore wi' me at once and try and put some sense into the head of this
obstinate native teacher."

"Why, what has he been doing?"

"Just pairsecuting an auld man of seventy and a wee bit of a child. And
if we canna mak' him tak' a sensible view of things, ye'll do a guid
action by taking the puir things awa' wi' ye to some ither pairt of the
South Seas, where the creatures can at least live."

Then he told his story. Six months before, a German trading vessel
had called at Maduro, and landed an old man of seventy and his
grand-daughter--a little girl of ten years of age. To the astonishment
of the people the old man proved to be a native of the island. His name
was Rime. He had left Maduro forty years before for Tahiti as a seaman.
At Tahiti he married, and then for many years worked with other Marshall
Islanders on Antimanao Plantation, where two children were born to
him. The elder of these, when she was fifteen years of age, married a
Frenchman trading in the Paumotu Islands.

The other child, a boy, was drowned at sea. For eight or nine years Rime
and his Tahitian wife, Tiaro, lived alone on the great plantation; then
Tiaro sickened and died, and Rime was left by himself. Then one day
came news to him from the distant Paumotus--his daughter and her white
husband had fallen victims to the small-pox, leaving behind them a
little girl. A month later Rime worked his way in a pearling schooner to
the island where his granddaughter lived, and claimed her. His heart was
empty he said. They would go to Maduro, though so many long, long years
had passed since he, then a strong man of thirty, had seen its low line
of palm-clad beach sink beneath the sea-rim; for he longed to hear the
sound of his mother tongue once more. And so the one French priest on
Marutea blessed him and the child--for Rime had become a Catholic during
his stay in the big plantation--and said that God would be good to them
both in their long journey across the wide Pacific to far-off