Guy Boothby

Sheilah Mcleod Guy Boothby

Publisher Marketing: Looking back on it now I can recall every circumstance connected with that day just as plainly as if it had all happened but yesterday. In the first place, it was about the middle of the afternoon, and the S. E. trade, which had been blowing lustily since ten o'clock, was beginning to die away according to custom. There had been a slight shower of rain in the forenoon, and now, standing in the verandah of my station looking across the blue lagoon with its fringe of boiling surf, it was my good fortune not only to have before me one of the finest pictures in the South Pacific, but to be able to distinctly smell the sweet perfume of the frangipani blossom and wild lime in the jungle which clothed the hillside behind me. I walked to one end[Pg 2] of the verandah and stood watching a group of native girls making tappa outside the nearest hut-then to the other, and glanced into my overflowing copra shed, and from it at the bare shelves of the big trade room opposite. The one, as I say, was full, the other sadly empty, and for more than a week I had been bitterly lamenting the non-arrival of the company's schooner, which was supposed to visit the island once every six months in order to remove my gains and to supply me with sufficient trade to carry me safely through the next half-year. Contributor Bio:  Boothby, Guy About The Author Guy Newell Boothby (1867 - 1905) was a prolific Australian novelist and writer, noted for sensational fiction in a variety magazines around the turn of the nineteenth century. He lived mainly in England. He is best known for such works as the Dr Nikola series, about an occultist criminal mastermind who is a Victorian forerunner to Fu Manchu, and Pharos, the Egyptian. Rudyard Kipling was his friend and mentor, and his books were remembered with affection by George Orwell.