ade a
losing bargain," thinks he. "But perhaps the man was only fooling me."
The first thing he did was to count his money; the sum was
exact--forty-nine dollars American money, and one Chili piece. "That
looks like the truth," said Keawe. "Now I will try another part."

The streets in that part of the city were as clean as a ship's decks,
and though it was noon, there were no passengers. Keawe set the bottle
in the gutter and walked away. Twice he looked back, and there was the
milky, round-bellied bottle where he left it. A third time he looked
back, and turned a corner; but he had scarce done so, when something
knocked upon his elbow, and behold! it was the long neck sticking up;
and as for the round belly, it was jammed into the pocket of his
pilot-coat.

"And that looks like the truth," said Keawe.

The next thing he did was to buy a corkscrew in a shop, and go apart
into a secret place in the fields. And there he tried to draw the cork,
but as often as he put the screw in, out it came again, and the cork as
whole as ever.

"This is some new sort of cork," said Keawe, and all at once he began to
shake and sweat, for he was afraid of that bottle.

On his way back to the port-side he saw a shop where a man sold shells
and clubs from the wild islands, old heathen deities, old coined money,
pictures from China and Japan, and all manner of things that sailors
bring in their seachests. And here he had an idea. So he went in and
offered the bottle for a hundred dollars. The man of the shop laughed at
him at the first, and offered him five; but, indeed, it was a curious
bottle--such glass was never blown in any human glass-works, so prettily
the colours shone under the milky white, and so strangely the shadow
hovered in the midst; so, after he had disputed a while after the manner
of his kind, the shopman gave Keawe sixty silver dollars for the thing,
and set it on a shelf in the midst of his window.

"Now," said Keawe, "I have sold that for sixty which I bought for
fifty--or, to say truth, a little less, because one of my dollars was
from Chili. Now I shall know the truth upon another point."

So he went back on board his ship, and, when he opened his chest, there
was the bottle, and had come more quickly than himself. Now Keawe had a
mate on board whose name was Lopaka.

"What ails you," said Lopaka, "that you stare in your chest?"

They were alone in the ship's forecastle, and Keawe bound him to
secrecy, and