ROMANCE ISLAND




CHAPTER I

DINNER TIME


As _The Aloha_ rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
parody upon capital letters:

"Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her--do you see? She
belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
of rope."

Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
own glorie"--he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
counter. For in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden
dreams--do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
happenings in this pleasant land of larvæ, few are so spectacular as
the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his _bien_. However, to
none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
himself.