nd. Then half-clothed
Caribs dashed into the water, and brought in on their backs the
_Valhalla's_ purser and the little native officials in their cotton
undershirts, blue trousers with red stripes, and flapping straw hats.

At college Geddie had been a treasure as a first-baseman. He now
closed his umbrella, stuck it upright in the sand, and stooped,
with his hands resting upon his knees. The purser, burlesquing
the pitcher's contortions, hurled at the consul the heavy roll of
newspapers, tied with a string, that the steamer always brought for
him. Geddie leaped high and caught the roll with a sounding "thwack."
The loungers on the beach--about a third of the population of the
town--laughed and applauded delightedly. Every week they expected to
see that roll of papers delivered and received in that same manner,
and they were never disappointed. Innovations did not flourish in
Coralio.

The consul re-hoisted his umbrella and walked back to the consulate.

This home of a great nation's representative was a wooden structure
of two rooms, with a native-built gallery of poles, bamboo and
nipa palm running on three sides of it. One room was the official
apartment, furnished chastely with a flat-top desk, a hammock, and
three uncomfortable cane-seated chairs. Engravings of the first and
latest president of the country represented hung against the wall.
The other room was the consul's living apartment.

It was eleven o'clock when he returned from the beach, and therefore
breakfast time. Chanca, the Carib woman who cooked for him, was just
serving the meal on the side of the gallery facing the sea--a spot
famous as the coolest in Coralio. The breakfast consisted of shark's
fin soup, stew of land crabs, breadfruit, a boiled iguana steak,
aguacates, a freshly cut pineapple, claret and coffee.

Geddie took his seat, and unrolled with luxurious laziness his bundle
of newspapers. Here in Coralio for two days or longer he would read
of goings-on in the world very much as we of the world read those
whimsical contributions to inexact science that assume to portray the
doings of the Martians. After he had finished with the papers they
would be sent on the rounds of the other English-speaking residents
of the town.

The paper that came first to his hand was one of those bulky
mattresses of printed stuff upon which the readers of certain New
York journals are supposed to take their Sabbath literary nap.
Opening this the consul res