Romance Island

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.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 communi-cate 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 larvae, 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.