The boy’s name, as Jerry was to learn, was Lamai, and to Lamai’s house Jerry was carried.  It was not much of a house, even as cannibal grass-houses go.  On an earthen floor, hard-packed of the filth¹ of years, lived Lamai’s father and mother and a spawn² of four younger brothers and sisters.  A thatched roof that leaked in every heavy shower leaned to a wabbly ridge-pole over the floor.  The walls were even more pervious to a driving rain.  In fact, the house of Lamai, who was the father of Lumai, was the most miserable³ house in all Somo.  
Lumai, the house-master and family head, unlike most Malaitans, was fat.  And of his fatness it would seem had been begotten⁴ his good nature with its allied⁵ laziness.  But as the fly in his ointment⁶ of jovial⁷ irresponsibility was his wife, Lenerengo—the prize shrew of Somo, who was as lean about the middle and all the rest of her as her husband was rotund; who was as remarkably⁸ sharp-spoken as he was soft-spoken; who was as ceaselessly energetic as he was unceasingly idle; and who had been born with a taste for the world as sour in her mouth as it was sweet in his.
 
The boy merely peered into the house as he passed around it to the rear, and he saw his father and mother, at opposite corners, sleeping without covering, and, in the middle of the floor, his four naked brothers and sisters curled together in a tangle¹⁰ like a litter of puppies.  All about the house, which in truth was scarcely more than an animal lair¹¹, was an earthly paradise.  The air was spicily¹² and sweetly heavy with the scents¹⁴ of wild aromatic¹⁵ plants and gorgeous tropic blooms.  Overhead three breadfruit trees interlaced their noble branches.  Banana and plantain trees were burdened with great bunches of ripening¹⁶ fruit.  And huge, golden melons of the papaia, ready for the eating, globuled directly from the slender-trunked trees not one-tenth the girth of the fruits they bore.  And, for Jerry, most delightful¹⁷ of all, there was the gurgle and plash of a brooklet¹⁸ that pursued its invisible way over mossy stones under a garmenture of tender and delicate ferns.  No conservatory²⁰ of a king could compare with this wild wantonness of sun-generous vegetation.
 
Maddened by the sound of the water, Jerry had first to endure an embracing and hugging from the boy, who, squatted²¹ on his hams, rocked back and forth²² and mumbled²³ a strange little crooning song.  And Jerry, lacking articulate speech, had no way of telling him of the thirst of which he was perishing.
 
Next, Lamai tied him securely with a sennit cord about the neck and untied²⁴ the cords that bit into his legs.  So numb²⁵ was Jerry from lack of circulation, and so weak from lack of water through part of a tropic day and all of a tropic night, that he stood up, tottered²⁶ and fell, and, time and again, essaying to stand, floundered and fell.  And Lamai understood, or tentatively guessed.  He caught up a coconut²⁷ calabash attached to the end of a stick of bamboo, dipped into the greenery of ferns, and presented to Jerry the calabash brimming with the precious water.
 
Jerry lay on his side at first as he drank, until, with the moisture, life flowed back into the parched²⁸ channels of him, so that, soon, still weak and shaky, he was up and braced²⁹ on all his four wide-spread legs and still eagerly lapping.  The boy chuckled³⁰ and chirped³¹ his delight in the spectacle, and Jerry found surcease and easement sufficient to enable him to speak with his tongue after the heart-eloquent manner of dogs.  He took his nose out of the calabash and with his rose-ribbon strip of tongue licked Lamai’s hand.  And Lamai, in ecstasy³² over this establishment of common speech, urged the calabash back under Jerry’s nose, and Jerry drank again.
 
He continued to drink.  He drank until his sun-shrunken sides stood out like the walls of a balloon, although longer were the intervals³³ from the drinking in which, with his tongue of gratefulness, he spoke⁹ against the black skin of Lamai’s hand.  And all went well, and would have continued to go well, had not Lamai’s mother, Lenerengo, just awakened³⁴, stepped across her black litter of progeny³⁵ and raised her voice in shrill³⁶ protest against her eldest³⁷ born’s introducing of one more mouth and much more nuisance into the household.
 
A squabble of human speech followed, of which Jerry knew no word but of which he sensed the significance.  Lamai was with him and for him.  Lamai’s mother was against him.  She shrilled³⁸ and shrewed her firm conviction that her son was a fool and worse because he had neither the consideration nor the silly sense of a fool’s solicitude³⁹ for a hard-worked mother.  She appealed to the sleeping Lumai, who awoke heavily and fatly, who muttered and mumbled easy terms of Somo dialect to the effect that it was a most decent world, that all puppy dogs and eldest-born sons were right delightful things to possess, that he had never yet starved to death, and that peace and sleep were the finest things that ever befell the lot............