it brought news of wars
and rumours of wars nor tales of great events on this continent or in
that archipelago, but because it brought to him a sheaf of letters, all
addressed in the same prim handwriting and bearing the same postmark;
and a sheaf of copies of the South New Medford _Daily Republican_. The
letters he read at once greedily, but with the newspapers he had a
different way. He shucked them out of their wrappers, arranged them in
proper chronological order with those bearing the later dates at the
bottom and those bearing the older dates upon the top of the heap, then
stacked them on a shelf in his living room. And each morning he read a
paper.

In the beginning of his sojourn on Good Friday Island he had made a
grievous mistake. Following the arrival of the first steamer after he
took over his duties as resident manager for the _British Great Eastern_
he had indulged himself in a perfect orgy of reading. He had read all
his _Daily Republicans_ in two days' time, gorging himself on home news,
on mention of familiar names and on visions of familiar scenes. Then had
ensued sixty-odd days of emptiness until the steamer brought another
batch of papers to him.

From that time on he read one paper a day and one only. Reading it he
lived the life of the town and became one of its citizens; a sharer at
long distance in its joys, its sorrows and its small thrills. But never
now did he read more than one paper in a single day; the lesson of those
two months had sunk in. No temptation, howsoever strong--the desire to
know how the divorce trial of the H. K. Peabodys turned out, the itch of
yearning to learn whether the body of the man found drowned in Exeter
Pond was identified--proved potent enough to pull him away from his
rule. That the news he read was anywhere from ten weeks to four months
old when it reached him did not matter; in fact he very soon forgot that
such was the case. For two precious hours a day he was translated back
to the day and date that the rumpled sheet in his hands carried on its
first page. Afterward he reverted quite naturally and without conscious
jar to the proper time of the year as advertised by the calendar.

His routine would be like this: He would rise early, before the heat of
the day was upon Good Friday Island to make it steam and sweat and give
off smells. He would shave himself and bathe and put on clean loose
garments, all white except where the stains of the wild, yellow berrie