by a name which sounded like "Pooh-pooh."

Among an English-speaking people it would have been a hard-enough lot to
be pooh-poohed through life by every personable female one met. Here the
coupled syllables carried an added sting of contemptuousness. In the
language of the country they meant runty, mean-figured, undersized. A
graceful girl, her naked limbs glistening with coconut oil, a necklet of
flowers about her throat and a hibiscus bloom pasted to her cheek like a
beauty spot, meeting him in the road would give him a derisive smile
over her shoulder and with the unconscious cruelty of primitive folk
would softly puff out "Pooh-pooh" through her pursed lips as she passed
him by. And it hurt. Certain of the white residents called him Pooh-pooh
too, which hurt more deeply.

How he hated the whole thing--the dampness which mildewed his shoes and
rusted out his nettings; the day heat which kept him bathed in
clamminess; the pestiferous insects; the forest with its voices like
sobbings and hammerings and demoniac chatterings; the food he had to
eat; the company he had to keep; the chiefs who bored him; the girls who
derided him; the beachcombers who nauseated him; the white sands, the
blue waters, the smells, the sounds, the routine of existence with one
day precisely like another--the whole thing of it. We may picture him as
a humid duck-legged little man, most terribly homesick, most
tremendously lonely, most distressingly alien. We may go further and
picture him as a sort of combination of Job with his afflictions,
Robinson Crusoe with no man Friday to cheer him in his solitude, and
Peter the Hermit with no dream of a crusade to uplift him. In these four
years his hair had turned almost white, yet he was still under forty.

To all about him, white people and brown people alike, the coming of the
steamer was an event of supremest importance. For the islanders it meant
a short season of excitement, most agreeable to their natures. For the
whites it meant a fleeting but none the less delectable contact with the
world outside, with lands beyond, upon which all of them, for this
reason or that, had turned their backs, and to which some of them dared
never return.

In his case the world did not mean the world at large but merely the
small circumscribed world of South New Medford, which was his world. To
him South New Medford comprehended and summed up all that was really
worth while. He welcomed the steamer not because