To any one requiring the services of a thoroughly efficient window-dresser and salesman, I can heartily recommend Steve. Until the occasion of the dream ship's jumble sale I had, it appears, misjudged the man. Prose poems to a piece of voile (double width, slightly soiled and cunningly displayed on an arm) fell from his lips like rain. Imitation leather belts, looking glasses conveying a somewhat distorted reflection, near tortoise-shell haircombs, rusty knives, even jew's-harps, each and all possessed some sterling virtue of which I had been ignorant until enlightened by Steve. And they "went." It was my humble duty to make a note of the sales, and there was no keeping tally of them. In twenty minutes our "counters" were bare, and our customers clamouring for more.
And this was not all. From below, where Peter was supposed to be conducting a kind of ice-cream social without the ice-cream, came the unmistakable sounds of "barter," and when we mere males had succeeded in fighting our way through a solid mass of femininity, it was to behold her surrounded with a drift of every domestic commodity from raspberry jam to a safety-pin.
"They wanted them so badly, poor things," she confessed to me after the fracas, but did not succeed in hiding from me the embers of battle in her eye. Brothers are awkward things.
The National Sport at Palmerston Island—Shooting the Pass;
Dragging a Boat through the Reef Pass
It was only when the last boatload of cheerful humanity had taken its departure, and we of the dream ship were dividing the spoils, that it was discovered by a closer reference to the invoices we had sold everything at cost!
Four more days we spent at Palmerston for the simple reason that we could not tear ourselves away.
It was a pleasant thing of an evening to wander over the firm wet sand of the beaches hand in hand with singing children, while a tribe of dogs leapt after mocking sea birds, or splashed into rock-pools snapping at the fish.
The Taro Patch