ime while
employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This accomplished, however, he
turned round--when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of
a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large
blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible
bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is,
just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face
so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be
sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were
stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this;
but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of
a white man--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been
tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his
distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,
thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any
sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that
part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the
squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of
tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man
into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas;
and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the
skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,
this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty
having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled
out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing
these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New
Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed it down into the bag.
He now took off his hat--a new beaver hat--when I came nigh singing out
with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head--none to speak of at
least--nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His
bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.
Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted
out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but
it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of
this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehens