and couldn't be undone. All I could do was to get what was left of
it, and my new stuff (my own choice) in order, to go round and get
after the rats and cockroaches, and to fix up that store regular
Sydney style. A fine show I made of it; and the third morning when
I had lit my pipe and stood in the door-way and looked in, and
turned and looked far up the mountain and saw the cocoanuts 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