f my depression. He was nipping
gin all the while. Sometimes he fell asleep, and awoke again, whimpering
and shivering, and every now and again he would ask me why I wanted to
marry Uma. "My friend," I was telling myself all day, "you must not come
to be an old gentleman like this."

It might be four in the afternoon, perhaps, when the back door was
thrust slowly open, and a strange old native woman crawled into the
house almost on her belly. She was swathed in black stuff to her heels;
her hair was grey in swatches; her face was tattooed, which was not the
practice in that island; her eyes big and bright and crazy. These she
fixed upon me with a rapt expression that I saw to be part acting. She
said no plain words, but smacked and mumbled with her lips, and hummed
aloud, like a child over its Christmas pudding. She came straight across
the house, heading for me, and, as soon as she was alongside, caught up
my hand and purred and crooned over it like a great cat. From this she
slipped into a kind of song.

"Who the devil's this?" cried I, for the thing startled me.

"It's Fa'avao," says Randall; and I saw he had hitched along the floor
into the farthest corner.

"You ain't afraid of her?" I cried.

"Me 'fraid!" cried the captain. "My dear friend, I defy her! I don't let
her put her foot in here, only I suppose 's different to-day, for the
marriage. 's Uma's mother."

"Well, suppose it is; what's she carrying on about?" I asked, more
irritated, perhaps more frightened, than I cared to show; and the
captain told me she was making up a quantity of poetry in my praise
because I was to marry Uma. "All right, old lady," says I, with rather a
failure of a laugh, "anything to oblige. But when you're done with my
hand, you might let me know."

She did as though she understood; the song rose into a cry, and stopped;
the woman crouched out of the house the same way that she came in, and
must have plunged straight into the bush, for when I followed her to the
door she had already vanished.

"These are rum manners," said I.

"'s a rum crowd," said the captain, and, to my surprise, he made the
sign of the cross on his bare bosom.

"Hillo!" says I, "are you a Papist?"

He repudiated the idea with contempt. "Hard-shell Baptis'," said he.
"But, my dear friend, the Papists got some good ideas too; and tha' 's
one of 'em. You take my advice, and whenever you come across Uma or
Fa'avao or Vigours, or any of that crowd, you ta