ch
would never do. Up I stood, made believe to stretch myself, came down
the verandah stair, and strolled towards the river. There went a short
buzz from one to the other, like what you hear in theatres when the
curtain goes up; and some of the nearest gave back the matter of a pace.
I saw a girl lay one hand on a young man and make a gesture upward with
the other; at the same time she said something in the native with a
gasping voice. Three little boys sat beside my path, where I must pass
within three feet of them. Wrapped in their sheets, with their shaved
heads and bits of top-knots, and queer faces, they looked like figures
on a chimney-piece. A while they sat their ground, solemn as judges. I
came up hand over fist, doing my five knots, like a man that meant
business; and I thought I saw a sort of a wink and gulp in the three
faces. Then one jumped up (he was the farthest off) and ran for his
mammy. The other two, trying to follow suit, got foul, came to ground
together bawling, wriggled right out of their sheets mother-naked, and
in a moment there were all three of them scampering for their lives and
singing out like pigs. The natives, who would never let a joke slip,
even at a burial, laughed and let up, as short as a dog's bark.

They say it scares a man to be alone. No such thing. What scares him in
the dark or the high bush is that he can't make sure, and there might be
an army at his elbow. What scares him worst is to be right in the midst
of a crowd, and have no guess of what they're driving at. When that
laugh stopped, I stopped too. The boys had not yet made their offing,
they were still on the full stretch going the one way, when I had
already gone about ship and was sheering off the other. Like a fool I
had come out, doing my five knots; like a fool I went back again. It
must have been the funniest thing to see, and, what knocked me silly,
this time no one laughed; only one old woman gave a kind of pious moan,
the way you have heard Dissenters in their chapels at the sermon.

"I never saw such fools of Kanakas as your people here," I said once to
Uma, glancing out of the window at the starers.

"Savvy nothing," says Uma, with a kind of disgusted air that she was
good at.

And that was all the talk we had upon the matter, for I was put out, and
Uma took the thing so much as a matter of course that I was fairly
ashamed.

All day, off and on, now fewer and now more, the fools sat about the
west end o