vers of Tahiti or Upolu, not for them to splash and laugh in the hour
of the dusk with a villageful of gay companions; but to steal here
solitary, to crouch in a place like a cow-wallow, and wash (if that can
be called washing) in lukewarm mud, brown as their own skins. Other, but
still rare, encounters occur to my memory. I was several times arrested
by a tender sound in the bush of voices talking, soft as flutes and with
quiet intonations. Hope told a flattering tale: I put aside the leaves;
and behold! in place of the expected dryads, a pair of all too solid
ladies squatting over a clay pipe in the ungraceful _ridi_. The beauty
of the voice and the eye was all that remained to these vast dames; but
that of the voice was exquisite indeed. It is strange I should have
never heard a more winning sound of speech, yet the dialect should be
one remarkable for violent, ugly, and outlandish vocables; so that
Tembinok' himself declared it made him weary, and professed to find
repose in talking English.

The state of this folk, of whom I saw so little, I can merely guess at.
The king himself explains the situation with some art. "No; I no pay
them," he once said. "I give them tobacco. They work for me _all the
same brothers_." It is true there was a brother once in Arden! But we
prefer the shorter word. They bear every servile mark,--levity like a
child's, incurable idleness, incurious content. The insolence of the
cook was a trait of his own; not so his levity, which he shared with the
innocent Uncle Parker. With equal unconcern both gambolled under the
shadow of the gallows, and took liberties with death that might have
surprised a careless student of man's nature. I wrote of Parker that he
behaved like a boy of ten: what was he else, being a slave of sixty? He
had passed all his years in school, fed, clad, thought for, commanded;
and had grown familiar and coquetted with the fear of punishment. By
terror you may drive men long, but not far. Here, in Apemama, they work
at the constant and the instant peril of their lives; and are plunged in
a kind of lethargy of laziness. It is common to see one go afield in his
stiff mat ungirt, so that he walks elbows-in like a trussed fowl; and
whatsoever his right hand findeth to do, the other must be off duty
holding on his clothes. It is common to see two men carrying between
them on a pole a single bucket of water. To make two bites of a cherry
is good enough: to make two burthens of a