end of the
connection. This was a laborious and a vexatious proceeding,
necessitating the handling and rehandling of every bit of incoming or
outbound cargo several times. But then, steamers did not come very
often to Good Friday Island; one came every two months about.

The expanse upon which Ethan Pratt looked when he turned his eyes
outward was of an incredible whiteness. You would have thought it to be
the whitest, most blinding thing in the world until you considered the
road that skirted it and some of the buildings that bordered it. For the
road was built of crushed coral, so dazzlingly white that to look
fixedly at it for thirty seconds in bright weather was to make the
eyeballs ache; and the buildings referred to were built of blocks of
white coral like exaggerated cubes of refined sugar. These buildings
were the chapels and churches--Methodist, Catholic, Seventh Day
Adventist, English Wesleyan and American Mormon. When the sun shone
clear the water on beyond became a shimmering blazing shield of
white-hot metal; and an hour of uninterrupted gazing upon it would have
turned an argus into a blinkard. But other times--early morning or
evening or when stormy weather impended--the lagoon became all a
wonderful deep clear blue, the colour of molten stained glass. One
peering then into its depths saw, far down below, marvellous sea gardens
all fronded and ferny and waving; and through the foliage of this
fairy-land went darting schools and shoals of fish queerly shaped and as
brilliantly coloured as tropical birds.

At the top of the beach, girdling it on its land side, and stencilling
themselves against the sky line, ran a fringing of coconut palms. The
trunks were naked almost to the tops, where the foliage revealed itself
in flaring clumps of green. Viewed separately a tree was suggestive of a
great bird standing on one leg with its head hidden under its wing, its
rump up-reared and its splayed tail feathers saluting the skies. Viewed
together they made a spectacle for which nothing in the temperate zones,
animal or vegetable, offers a measurable comparison. When the wind blew
softly the trees whispered among themselves. When the wind blew hard and
furiously, as often it did, or when the trade breeze swelled to
hurricane speed, the coconuts in their long bearded husks would be
wrenched free and would come hurtling through the air like fletched
cannon balls. When one of them struck a tin roof there resulted a
ter