ant one gathers that for the four years of his life
he spent on Good Friday Island Ethan Pratt lived in the rear room of a
two-room house of frame standing on a beach with a little village about
it, a jungle behind it, a river half-mooning it and a lagoon before it.
In the rear room he bedded and baited himself. The more spacious front
room into which his housekeeping quarters opened was a store of sorts
where he retailed print goods staple, tinned foods assorted and
gimcracks various to his customers, these mostly being natives. The
building was crowned with a tin roof and on top of the roof there
perched a round water tank, like a high hat on a head much too large for
it. The use of this tank was to catch and store up rain water, which ran
into it from the sloping top of a larger and taller structure standing
partly alongside and partly back of the lesser structure. The larger
building--a shed it properly was; a sprawling wide-eaved barracks of a
shed--was for the storing of copra, the chief article for export
produced on Good Friday Island.

Copra, as all know--or as all should know, since it has come to be one
of the most essential vegetable products of the world, a thing needful
in the manufacture of nearly every commercial output in which fatty
essences are required--is the dried meat of the nut of the coconut palm.
So rich is it in oils that soap makers--to cite one of the industries
employing it--scarce could do without it; but like many of this earth's
most profitable and desirable yieldings it has its unpretty aspects. For
one thing it stinks most abominably while it is being cured, and after
it has been cured it continues to stink, with a lessened intensity. For
another thing, the all-pervading reek of the stuff gets into food that
is being prepared anywhere in its bulked vicinity.

Out in front of the establishment over which Ethan Pratt presided, where
the sandy beach met the waters, was a rickety little wharf like a hyphen
to link the grit with the salt. Down to the outer tip of the wharf ran a
narrow-gauge track of rusted iron rails, and over the track on occasion
plied little straddlebug handcars. Because the water offshore was shoal
ships could not come in very close but must lie well out in the lagoon
and their unloadings and their reloadings were carried on by means of
whale-boats ferrying back and forth between ship side and dock side with
the push cars to facilitate the freight movement at the land