Explore "The Call of the South" by Louis Becke on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Old Kala-hoi, the net-maker, had ceased work for the day, and was seated on a mat outside his little house, smoking his pipe, looking dreamily out upon the blue waters of Leone Bay, on Tutuila Island, and enjoying the cool evening breeze that blew upon his bare limbs and played with the two scanty tufts of snow-white hair that grew just above his ears.
As he sat and smoked in quiet content, Marsh (the mate of our vessel) and I discerned him from the beach, as we stepped out of the boat We were both tired -- Marsh with weighing and stowing bags of copra in the steaming hold, and I with paying the natives for it in trade goods -- a task that had taken me from dawn till supper time. Then, as the smell of the copra and the heat of the cabin were not conducive to the enjoyment of supper, we first had a bathe alongside the ship, got into clean pyjamas and came on shore to have a chat with old Kala-hoi.