a tramway running down to a shaky wharf, and a busted
bookkeeper coming in every Tuesday night to post my books. I was a South
Sea merchant now, and was reaping the fruit of all them lonely slaving
days on the Line. No more pajamas neither, but a clean, white suit every
day, and with Rosie perking up like she did, them were real good times
for me, and pleasant to look back on; and though I do say it myself, my
neighbors liked me and I was respected and looked up to, and I was
called the Gilbert Island Consul from the way I was always ready to
befriend anybody from there, whether white or native, even once going
before the Supreme Court and being complimented by the Chief Justice on
behalf of some Nonootch people whose wages were being held back.

Then my ward run me for the Municipal Council, and I was elected by
twenty-two votes to four over Grevsmuhl; and I can tell you it made me
feel a mighty proud man to be honored like that and placed so high; and
if my head didn't swell I guess my heart did, to almost bursting, at
such a rise in life, and one so unexpected and undreamed of. It hardly
seemed it could be me the police touched their caps to, or the consuls
confabbed with about local affairs as they dropped in to buy a
toothbrush or a pair of socks--me who had landed there so short a time
before in my pajamas and kind of dazed at the size and noise of the
place after the silence of the Line--just common old me, with earrings
in my ears and gaping like a Rube.

It meant a big uplift to me in every kind of a way, and I was a better
man for all that confidence and trust, and wanted like hell to show I
was worth it. The week after I was elected to the Council I married
Rosie proper and right, thinking a Councillor ought to set an example in
his community; and every one was very cordial to me about it, especially
in my own ward, where two or three of them even followed my lead, saying
that with the mail steamers now calling and the town generally on the up
grade, it was time to let go on the old, wrong way of things, and get
into line with civilization.

Whether it was the change from the coral islands or the lavish new diet
or what, Rosie had been laying on flesh for a long time in a quiet,
unnoticed kind of way till finally she suddenly plumped up like a
balloon. My, but she grew something awful, a waddling, monstrous
mountain of a woman, with her eyes burying like a pig's, and the whole
of her shaking as she walked.