lle and I speak as our native language.
And what is more--and more strange--gather from his tone and the tenor of
his remarks, he was taught, long since--a century ago, or more--and by an
English sailor!"

Muriel held out a bit of banana on a sharp stick to the bird.
Methuselah-Polly took it gingerly off the end, like a well-behaved
parrot? "God save the king!" Muriel said, in a quiet voice, trying to
draw him on to speak a little further.

Methuselah twisted his eye sideways, first this way, then that, and
responded in a very clear tone, indeed, "God save the king! Confound the
Duke of York! Long live Dr. Oates! And to hell with all papists!"

CHAPTER XXII.

TANTALIZING, VERY.

They looked at one another again with a wild surmise. The voice was as
the voice of some long past age. Could the parrot be speaking to them in
the words of seventeenth-century English?

Even M. Peyron, who at first had received the strange discovery with
incredulity, woke up before long to the importance of this sudden and
unexpected revelation. The Tu-Kila-Kila who had taught Methuselah that
long poem or sermon, which native tradition regarded as containing the
central secret of their creed or its mysteries, and which the cruel and
cunning Tu-Kila-Kila of to-day believed to be of immense importance to
his safety--that Tu-Kila-Kila of other days was, in all probability, no
other than an English sailor. Cast on these shores, perhaps, as they
themselves had been, by the mercy of the waves, he had managed to master
the language and religion of the savages among whom he found himself
thrown; he had risen to be the representative of the cannibal god; and,
during long months or years of tedious exile, he had beguiled his leisure
by imparting to the unconscious ears of a bird the weird secret of his
success, for the benefit of any others of his own race who might be
similarly treated by fortune in future. Strange and romantic as it all
sounded, they could hardly doubt now that this was the real explanation
of the bird's command of English words. One problem alone remained to
disturb their souls. Was the bird really in possession of any local
secret and mystery at all, or was this the whole burden of the message he
had brought down across the vast abyss of time--"God save the king, and
to hell with all papists?"

Felix turned to M. Peyron in a perfect tumult of suspense. "What he
recites is long?" he said, interrogatively, with profound