ined--a silent, sober,
solitary, niggardly recluse, of whom the king remarks, "I think he good;
he no 'peak."

I was warned at the outset we might very well fail in our design; yet
never dreamed of what proved to be the fact, that we should be left
four-and-twenty hours in suspense and come within an ace of ultimate
rejection. Captain Reid had primed himself; no sooner was the king on
board, and the Hennetti question amicably settled, than he proceeded to
express my request and give an abstract of my claims and virtues. The
gammon about Queen Victoria's son might do for Butaritari; it was out of
the question here; and I now figured as "one of the Old Men of England,"
a person of deep knowledge, come expressly to visit Tembinok's dominion,
and eager to report upon it to the no less eager Queen Victoria. The
king made no shadow of an answer, and presently began upon a different
subject. We might have thought he had not heard, or not understood; only
that we found ourselves the subject of a constant study. As we sat at
meals, he took us in series and fixed upon each, for near a minute at a
time, the same hard and thoughtful stare. As he thus looked he seemed to
forget himself, the subject and the company, and to become absorbed in
the process of his thought; the look was wholly impersonal: I have seen
the same in the eyes of portrait-painters. The counts upon which whites
have been deported are mainly four: cheating Tembinok', meddling
overmuch with copra, which is the source of his wealth and one of the
sinews of his power, _'peaking_, and political intrigue. I felt
guiltless upon all; but how to show it? I would not have taken copra in
a gift: how to express that quality by my dinner-table bearing? The
rest of the party shared my innocence and my embarrassment. They shared
also in my mortification when after two whole meal-times and the odd
moments of an afternoon devoted to this reconnoitring, Tembinok' took
his leave in silence. Next morning, the same undisguised study, the same
silence, was resumed; and the second day had come to its maturity before
I was informed abruptly that I had stood the ordeal. "I look your eye.
You good man. You no lie," said the king: a doubtful compliment to a
writer of romance. Later he explained he did not quite judge by the eye
only, but the mouth as well. "Tuppoti I see man," he explained. "I no
tavvy good man, bad man. I look eye, look mouth. Then I tavvy. Look
_eye_, look mouth," he re