But of all this on that first morning I knew no more than a fly.  Case used me like a gentleman and like a friend, made me welcome to Falesa, and put his services at my disposal, which was the more helpful from my ignorance of the native.  All the better part of the day we sat drinking better acquaintance in the cabin, and I never heard a man talk more to the point.  There was no smarter trader, and none dodgier, in the islands.  I thought Falesa seemed to be the right kind of a place; and the more I drank the lighter my heart.  Our last trader had fled the place at half an hour’s notice, taking a chance passage in a labour ship from up west.  The captain, when he came, had found the station closed, the keys left with the native pastor, and a letter from the runaway, confessing he was fairly frightened of his life.  Since then the firm had not been represented, and of course there was no cargo.  The wind, besides, was fair, the captain hoped he could make his next island by dawn, with a good tide, and the business of landing my trade was gone about lively.  There was no call for me to fool with it, Case said; nobody would touch my things, everyone was honest in Falesa, only about chickens or an odd knife or an odd stick of tobacco; and the best I could do was to sit quiet till the vessel left, then come straight to his house, see old Captain Randall, the father of the beach, take pot-luck, and go home to sleep when it got dark.  So it was high noon, and the schooner was under way before I set my foot on shore at Falesa.

I had a glass or two on board; I was just off a long cruise, and the ground heaved under me like a ship’s deck.  The world was like all new painted; my foot went along to music; Falesa might have been Fiddler’s Green, if there is such a place, and more’s the pity if there isn’t!  It was good to foot the grass, to look aloft at the green mountains, to see the men with their green wreaths and the women in their bright dresses, red and blue.  On we went, in the strong sun and the cool shadow, liking both; and all the children in the town came trotting after with their shaven heads and their brown bodies, and raising a thin kind of a cheer in our wake, like crowing poultry.

“By-the-bye,” says Case, “we must get you a wife.”

“That’s so,” said I; “I had forgotten.”

There was a crowd of girls about us, and I pulled myself up and looked among them like a Bashaw.  They were all dressed out for the sake of the ship being in; and the women of Falesa are a handsome lot to see.  If they have a fault, they are a trifle broad in the beam; and I was just thinking so when Case touched me.

“That’s pretty,” says he.

I saw one coming on the other side alone.  She had been fishing; all she wore was a chemise, and it was wetted through.  She was young and very slender for an island maid, with a long face, a high forehead, and a shy, strange, blindish look, between a cat’s and a baby’s.