Among the missionaries he had acquaintances but no friends. He despised the swaggering beachcombers who had flung off the decencies of civilisation along with the habiliments of civilisation and who found a marrowy sweetness in the husks of the prodigal. Even more he despised the hectoring Germans with their flaming red and yellow beards, their thick-lensed spectacles, their gross manners when among their own kind and their brutishness in all their dealings with the natives--a brutishness so universal among them that no Polynesian would work at any price for a German, and every German had to depend for his plantation labour upon imported black boys from the Solomons and from New Guinea, who having once been trapped or, to use the trade word, indented, were thereafter held in an enforced servitude and paid with the bond-man's wage of bitter bread and bloody stripes. He had never been able to get under the skin of a native; indeed he had never tried. In all the things that go to make up an understanding of a fellow mortal's real nature they still were to him as completely strangers as they had been on the day he landed in this place. Set down in the midst of a teeming fecundity he nevertheless remained as truly a castaway as though he had floated ashore on a bit of wreckage. He could have been no more and no less a maroon had the island which received him been a desert island instead of a populous one. When a chief paid him a formal visit, bringing a gift of taro root and sitting for hours upon his veranda, the grave courtesy of the ceremony, in which a white man differently constituted might have taken joy, merely bored him unutterably. As for the native women, they had as little of sex appeal for him as he had for them--which was saying a good deal now, because he was short and of a meagre shape, and the scorn of the Polynesian girl for a little man is measureless. The girls of Good Friday Island called him by a name which sounded like "Pooh-pooh." Among an English-speaking people it would have been a hard-enough lot to be pooh-poohed through life by every personable female one met. Here the coupled syllables carried an added sting of contemptuousness. In the language of the country they meant runty, mean-figured, undersized. A graceful girl, her naked limbs glistening with coconut oil, a necklet of flowers about her throat and a hibiscus bloom pasted to her cheek like a beauty spot, meeting him in the road would give him a derisive smile over her shoulder and with the unconscious cruelty of primitive folk would softly puff out "Pooh-pooh" through her pursed lips as she passed him by. And it hurt. Certain of the white residents called him Pooh-pooh too, which hurt more deeply.