HE stood five feet nothing in his naked feet, a muscular, sandy little fellow, with a shock of red hair, a pair of watery¹ blue eyes, and a tawny², sun-burned beard, the colour of fried carrots. I could not see myself that he was beautiful, and might have lived a year with him and never found it out; though he assured me, with a giggle³ of something like embarrassment⁴, that he was no less a person than the Beautiful Man of Pingalap. Such at least was his name amongst the natives, who had admired him so persistently⁵, and talked of him so much, that even the whites had come to call him by that familiar appellation⁷.

 

“You see,” he said, in that whining⁸ accent which no combination of letters can adequately render, “it tykes a man of a ruddy complexion⁹ to please them there Kanakas; and if he gains their respeck and ’as a w’y with him sort of jolly and careless-like, there’s nothing on their blooming island he carn’t have for the arsking.”

 

I gathered, however, as I talked with him in the shadow of the old boat-house in which we lived together at Ruk like a pair of tramps, that he, Henery Hinton, had not presumed to ask for much in those[32] isles¹⁰ from which he had so recently emerged. Indeed, except for a camphor-wood chest, a nondescript valise of decayed leather, a monkey, a parrot, and a young native lady named Bo, my friend owned no more in the world than the window-curtain pyjamas¹¹ in which he stood.

 

“It ain’t much, is it,” he said, with a sigh, “to show for eight long years on the Line? Sixty dollars and w’at you see before you! Though the monkey may be worth a trifle, and a w’aler captain once offered me a mee-lodian for the bird.”

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