How he hated the whole thing--the dampness which mildewed his shoes and rusted out his nettings; the day heat which kept him bathed in clamminess; the pestiferous insects; the forest with its voices like sobbings and hammerings and demoniac chatterings; the food he had to eat; the company he had to keep; the chiefs who bored him; the girls who derided him; the beachcombers who nauseated him; the white sands, the blue waters, the smells, the sounds, the routine of existence with one day precisely like another--the whole thing of it. We may picture him as a humid duck-legged little man, most terribly homesick, most tremendously lonely, most distressingly alien. We may go further and picture him as a sort of combination of Job with his afflictions, Robinson Crusoe with no man Friday to cheer him in his solitude, and Peter the Hermit with no dream of a crusade to uplift him. In these four years his hair had turned almost white, yet he was still under forty. To all about him, white people and brown people alike, the coming of the steamer was an event of supremest importance. For the islanders it meant a short season of excitement, most agreeable to their natures. For the whites it meant a fleeting but none the less delectable contact with the world outside, with lands beyond, upon which all of them, for this reason or that, had turned their backs, and to which some of them dared never return. In his case the world did not mean the world at large but merely the small circumscribed world of South New Medford, which was his world. To him South New Medford comprehended and summed up all that was really worth while. He welcomed the steamer not because it brought news of wars and rumours of wars nor tales of great events on this continent or in that archipelago, but because it brought to him a sheaf of letters, all addressed in the same prim handwriting and bearing the same postmark; and a sheaf of copies of the South New Medford _Daily Republican_. The letters he read at once greedily, but with the newspapers he had a different way. He shucked them out of their wrappers, arranged them in proper chronological order with those bearing the later dates at the bottom and those bearing the older dates upon the top of the heap, then stacked them on a shelf in his living room. And each morning he read a paper. In the beginning of his sojourn on Good Friday Island he had made a grievous mistake. Following the arrival of the first steamer after he took over his duties as resident manager for the _British Great Eastern_ he had indulged himself in a perfect orgy of reading. He had read all his _Daily Republicans_ in two days' time, gorging himself on home news, on mention of familiar names and on visions of familiar scenes. Then had ensued sixty-odd days of emptiness until the steamer brought another batch of papers to him.