Note 185 — Chapter XXI · SOUTHERN COAST

During my two years in the Isle this family was subjected to all the trouble and expense of moving three times, that is to say, of selling off their furniture (of course at considerable loss), renting and furnishing a new home, and finding new servants.

This system of continually, and on the shortest notice, moving Civil servants from one corner of the Isle to another, either as a ‘permanent’ appointment or as locum tenens for some one temporarily transferred to other work, is a very grave drawback. No sooner has a man begun to understand his duties in one district, and to know something of the people around him, than he is liable to be uprooted and ordered off to take up an entirely different line of work, perhaps among people of another race and language.