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Then little Ben came, and for a time it looked as though he was going to be quite a boy, and grow up. But at the end of twenty-one months, as he was nearing his second birthday, he sickened and died; and we dressed him up in his poor little best, and put him away forever in the coral. Rosie took on about it terrible–so terrible that I think something must have broken in her brain. She was never the same afterwards; not that she was always mourning, I don’t mean that–but she grew cranky and queer and changed in every way. She would start into a fury at a word, and throw things about, and scream. She would tell the most awful lies about how I had treated her, and invent things that never took place. Even on a dot of a coral island there is gossip and slander and a Kanaka Mrs. Grundy, and Rosie was doing her best to ruin me, so that I was avoided, and the King and the other high muck-a-mucks went to Tyson’s, the opposition trader, and tabooed my store till I didn’t know which way to turn.

I ought to have sold out and quit, and left Rosie on the other fellow like Feltenshaw had done me. But I loved her for what she had been to me, and for the poor mite moldering under ground, and so just took my medicine for a whole miserable year and let it go at that. Every misfortune I’ve had in life I seem to trace to what was good and generous in me. Certainly if I’d shaken her off then and there, I would have been a happier man, and been saved things that have since almost drove me mad.

The upshot of it was that finally I did sell the station to a couple of Chinamen–brothers–and I would like to say right here there never was a whiter pair than these two, or any that stood up straighter to a bargain. Once the main price was fixed, there was no haggling over valuations, nor any backwardness or suspicion, though in the rush I was in not to hold the schooner over long, it would have been easy to beat me out of a hundred dollars or two. They pulled us off to the vessel–me and Rosie and them three camphor-wood chests with the bell locks and a big roll of mats and a keg of silver dollars–and an hour later six years of my life had sunk with the palms, as lost and disappeared as the schooner’s wake in the sea behind us.

After the Line Apia struck me as a wonderfully bustling, busy little place, and I took to it like a man does who’s had nothing but coral and coconuts to look at till all the world seems nothing else. It came over me what a prisoner I’d been up there, and how much I had paid in unthought-of ways for that keg of Chile money. Rosie, too, brightened up considerable with the novelty of it all, and was so gay and laughing and like her old self that I was gladder than ever at having made the change.

It didn’t take me long to size up conditions; and the better part of that keg soon put me in possession of a two-story house and store in the center of the town on the main street, with a pretty good stock taken over from the widow of the man who had lately died there. I was hardly what could be called a trader any more, what with a place so big and fine, with a tramway running down to a shaky wharf, and a busted bookkeeper coming in every Tuesday night to post my books. I was a South Sea merchant now, and was reaping the fruit of all them lonely slaving days on the Line. No more pajamas neither, but a clean, white suit every day, and with Rosie perking up like she did, them were real good times for me, and pleasant to look back on; and though I do say it myself, my neighbors liked me and I was respected and looked up to, and I was called the Gilbert Island Consul from the way I was always ready to befriend anybody from there, whether white or native, even once going before the Supreme Court and being complimented by the Chief Justice on behalf of some Nonootch people whose wages were being held back.