reef, and it was more like a home than I'd ever
had in my wandering, lonely, up-and-down life. She was quick to learn,
and loving to beat the band, yet ever kind of imperious and saucy like I
belonged to her instead of its being the other way around. She had no
idea of white people--used to say they looked like Kanakas who had been
drowned for a week--and was most scornful how it was always copra,
copra, copra with us. It was just her way to tease me and make me cross,
for then she would snuggle up and ripple over with laughter and hold me
tight in her soft, round girlish arms, and say that I was _her_ copra--a
whole ship of it, and how she 'ud hang herself from a coconut tree if I
were to die--and by God, she would have done it, too, them Gilbert women
being great on love, and the thing happening often enough.

Several years passed, and I can't recall a single word of disagreement
between us. She was all the world to me in those days, and I doubt if in
the whole group there was a pair so happy. Ben's Rosie, they called
her--the captains and supercargoes and mates that came our way--and they
all thought a lot of her, and brought her many a little present that
made her eyes sparkle--such pretty eyes as they were, and so full of
fun--gold fish, and rolls of silk, and music boxes or a trade hat. It
was always a standing joke that she was tired of me, and was going to
run away with them; and if they were quite old, like Captain Smith or
Billy Baker, there wasn't any length she wouldn't go to, even to hugging
them and playing with their whiskers right before me, and saying in her
sweet, broken English: "Oh, you poor old captain, with nobody to love
you--but never mind, I go with you this time, sure I go, and Bennie can
get a girl from Big Muggin, oh, so pretty, who bite him like a dog!"

Then little Ben came, and for a time it looked as though he was going to
be quite a boy, and grow up. But at the end of twenty-one months, as he
was nearing his second birthday, he sickened and died; and we dressed
him up in his poor little best, and put him away forever in the coral.
Rosie took on about it terrible--so terrible that I think something must
have broken in her brain. She was never the same afterwards; not that
she was always mourning, I don't mean that--but she grew cranky and
queer and changed in every way. She would start into a fury at a word,
and throw things about, and scream. She would tell the most awful lies
about how