worst cook I suppose God made; the things she set her hand to it
would have sickened an honest horse to eat of; yet I made my meal
that day on Uma's cookery, and can never call to mind to have been
better pleased.

I didn't pretend to myself, and I didn't pretend to her. I saw I
was clean gone; and if she was to make a fool of me, she must. And
I suppose it was this that set her talking, for now she made sure
that we were friends. A lot she told me, sitting in my lap and
eating my dish, as I ate hers, from foolery - a lot about herself
and her mother and Case, all which would be very tedious, and fill
sheets if I set it down in Beach de Mar, but which I must give a
hint of in plain English, and one thing about myself which had a
very big effect on my concerns, as you are soon to hear.

It seems she was born in one of the Line Islands; had been only two
or three years in these parts, where she had come with a white man,
who was married to her mother and then died; and only the one year
in Falesa. Before that they had been a good deal on the move,
trekking about after the white man, who was one of those rolling
stones that keep going round after a soft job. They talk about
looking for gold at the end of a rainbow; but if a man wants an
employment that'll last him till he dies, let him start out on the
soft-job hunt. There's meat and drink in it too, and beer and
skittles, for you never hear of them starving, and rarely see them
sober; and as for steady sport, cock-fighting isn't in the same
county with it. Anyway, this beachcomber carried the woman and her
daughter all over the shop, but mostly to out-of-the-way islands,
where there were no police, and he thought, perhaps, the soft job
hung out. I've my own view of this old party; but I was just as