er, but I don't see why, when we met at meals, he should have
thumped me on the back, with loud, derisive inquiries: "How's the deadly
sport to-day? Butterflies going strong? Ha, ha, ha!"--especially as he
charged me two dollars per diem for the hospitality of the B. O. S. Co.,
Ltd., (capital L1,500,000, fully paid up), in whose balance-sheet for
that year those monies are no doubt included. "I don't think I can
make it anything less in justice to my company," he had remarked, with
extreme gravity, when I was arranging with him the terms of my stay on
the island.

His chaff would have been harmless enough if intimacy of intercourse
in the absence of all friendly feeling were not a thing detestable in
itself. Moreover, his facetiousness was not very amusing. It consisted
in the wearisome repetition of descriptive phrases applied to people
with a burst of laughter. "Desperate butterfly-slayer. Ha, ha, ha!" was
one sample of his peculiar wit which he himself enjoyed so much. And in
the same vein of exquisite humour he called my attention to the engineer
of the steam-launch, one day, as we strolled on the path by the side of
the creek.

The man's head and shoulders emerged above the deck, over which were
scattered various tools of his trade and a few pieces of machinery. He
was doing some repairs to the engines. At the sound of our footsteps
he raised anxiously a grimy face with a pointed chin and a tiny fair
moustache. What could be seen of his delicate features under the black
smudges appeared to me wasted and livid in the greenish shade of the
enormous tree spreading its foliage over the launch moored close to the
bank.

To my great surprise, Harry Gee addressed him as "Crocodile," in
that half-jeering, half-bullying tone which is characteristic of
self-satisfaction in his delectable kind:

"How does the work get on, Crocodile?"

I should have said before that the amiable Harry had picked up French
of a sort somewhere--in some colony or other--and that he pronounced
it with a disagreeable forced precision as though he meant to guy the
language. The man in the launch answered him quickly in a pleasant
voice. His eyes had a liquid softness and his teeth flashed dazzlingly
white between his thin, drooping lips. The manager turned to me, very
cheerful and loud, explaining:

"I call him Crocodile because he lives half in, half out of the creek.
Amphibious--see? There's nothing else amphibious living on the island
exce