nd. We were still strange to the
islands; we were pained by the poor man's generosity, which he could ill
afford, and, by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder, we
refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no
more; being what he was, the most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man,
he took a revenge a hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe
with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the _Casco_
was boarded from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because
he had no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming
thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a stranger
in the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my family basely
fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured friend alone; and
the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour, for he was loath to
tear himself away. "You go 'way. I see you no more--no, sir!" he
lamented; and then, looking about him with rueful admiration, "This
goodee ship--no, sir!--goodee ship!" he would exclaim; the "no, sir,"
thrown out sharply through the nose upon a rising inflection, an echo
from New Bedford and the fallacious whaler. From these expressions of
grief and praise, he would return continually to the case of the
rejected pig. "I like give plesent all 'e same you," he complained;
"only got pig: you no take him!" He was a poor man; he had no choice of
gifts; he had only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it. I have
rarely been more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so
grey, so poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to
appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so innocently
dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech is vain.

Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of
sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most
Anaho-women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a mite of
a creature at the breast. I went up the den one day when Tari was from
home, and found the son making a cotton sack, and madame suckling
mademoiselle. When I had sat down with them on the floor, the girl began
to question me about England; which I tried to describe, piling the pan
and the cocoa shells one upon another to represent the houses and
explaining, as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the
over-population, the hunger, and the perpetual toil. "_Pas de cocotiers?
pas d