waving and posted up the tons of copra, and over the village green and saw the island dandies and reckoned up the yards of print they wanted for their kilts and dresses, I felt as if I was in the right place to make a fortune, and go home again and start a public-house.  There was I, sitting in that verandah, in as handsome a piece of scenery as you could find, a splendid sun, and a fine fresh healthy trade that stirred up a man’s blood like sea-bathing; and the whole thing was clean gone from me, and I was dreaming England, which is, after all, a nasty, cold, muddy hole, with not enough light to see to read by; and dreaming the looks of my public, by a cant of a broad high-road like an avenue, and with the sign on a green tree.

So much for the morning, but the day passed and the devil anyone looked near me, and from all I knew of natives in other islands I thought this strange.  People laughed a little at our firm and their fine stations, and at this station of Falesa in particular; all the copra in the district wouldn’t pay for it (I had heard them say) in fifty years, which I supposed was an exaggeration.  But when the day went, and no business came at all, I began to get downhearted; and, about three in the afternoon, I went out for a stroll to cheer me up.  On the green I saw a white man coming with a cassock on, by which and by the face of him I knew he was a priest.  He was a good-natured old soul to look at, gone a little grizzled, and so dirty you could have written with him on a piece of paper.

“Good day, sir,” said I.

He answered me eagerly in native.

“Don’t you speak any English?” said I.

“French,” says he.

“Well,” said I, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything there.”

He tried me awhile in the French, and then again in native, which he seemed to think was the best chance.  I made out he was after more than passing the time of day with me, but had something to communicate, and I listened the harder.  I heard the names of Adams and Case and of Randall — Randall the oftenest — and the word “poison,” or something like it, and a native word that he said very often.  I went home, repeating it to myself.

“What does fussy-ocky mean?” I asked of Uma, for that was as near as I could come to it.

“Make dead,” said she.

“The devil it does!” says I.  “Did ever you hear that Case had poisoned Johnnie Adams?”

“Every man he savvy that,” says Uma, scornful-like.  “Give him white sand — bad sand.  He got the bottle still.  Suppose he give you gin, you no take him.”

Now I had heard much the same sort of story in other islands, and the same white powder always to the front, which made me think the less of it.  For all that, I went over to Randall’s place to see what I could pick up, and found Case on the doorstep, cleaning a gun.

“Good shooting here?” says I.

“A 1,” says he.  “The bush is full of all kinds of birds.  I wish copra was as plenty,” says he — I thought, slyly — “but there don’t seem anything doing.”