“‘Then I’ll get eight pound here,’ says he. ‘I see boats and steamers go past most weeks, but I don’t hear much news. When are you going?’
“I wasn’t going to let on about the beech-de-mar racket, so I opens my book and sings ‘Rock of Ages cleft for me.’ Soon as I begun he comes out and stands looking at me. I only knew one verse, but I kep’ on and sung it three times over, keeping as near as I could to the tune, and he kep’ looking at me all the time as solemn as a cockroach. When I done it three times I sang Amen, and he went back into the shanty. Then I took off my hat and knelt up with my hands clasped as if I was praying to myself. Soon as I got up he says, ‘Come in, will yer, and sit down a bit?’ and then he calls his woman and begins talking Tokelau to her, and she fetched in a dish of hot kumalas the old devil had been keeping back till he thought I’d go. Then she got some eggs and took ’em off to the cook-house, and the old beggar sat on the bed all the time and said he’d wait till I’d done. But just as I’d got hold of a kumala he says, ‘Aren’t you going to say grace?’ a bit suspicious-like, and I says, ‘Of course I am, but I always takes hold of the food first;’ so I holds up the kumalas over my head, and says, ‘For what we’re going to receive, Amen.’ But when we’d done dinner we were good friends, and he’d told me all about his soul, and asked after mine; and he sends the girls off with kumalas for my boys. Then I says that idleness is a bad thing, and I’d like ’em to do a little fishing on the reef at low tide, and he says, ‘But you wouldn’t have them take life?’
“‘Certainly not,’ I says. ‘I wouldn’t kill a fish, not if it jumped into my pocket and I was starving, but with beech-de-mar it’s different, for being a slug he ain’t got feelings, and even Darwin ain’t sure that he ain’t a vegetable.’
“‘That’s so,’ says the old beggar. ‘Well, as long as they don’t fish on Saturday or Sunday or Monday I don’t mind.’
“Well, by Friday night we’d got all the fish worth picking up on the lee side, and I got away on the Saturday, and promised I’d call in if I was passing, and there was a fire on the beach,—‘You might be wanting something, or be sick,’ I says.
“‘If I’m sick,’ he says, ‘I shan’t light a fire, for the Lord ’ll provide.’
“Barring religion, the old devil wasn’t so very cranky, except about a sort of fence he’d got under a dilo-tree. I thought it was a grave, and went to look at it, but he come running after me with his eyes half out of his head, and pulled me away by the arm. I suppose his woman had had a kid that had died, and he’d got it buried there. Perhaps it’s that that made him cranky. Well, there’s no fire on the beach, so if he’s alive he don’t want anything.”