most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a
hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe with the nine
villagers put off from their farewell before the Casco was boarded
from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because he had
no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming
thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a
stranger in the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my
family basely fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured
friend alone; and the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour,
for he was loath to tear himself away. 'You go 'way. I see you no
more--no, sir!' he lamented; and then looking about him with rueful
admiration, 'This goodee ship--no, sir!--goodee ship!' he would
exclaim: the 'no, sir,' thrown out sharply through the nose upon a
rising inflection, an echo from New Bedford and the fallacious
whaler. From these expressions of grief and praise, he would
return continually to the case of the rejected pig. 'I like give
present all 'e same you,' he complained; 'only got pig: you no
take him!' He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had
only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it. I have rarely been
more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so
poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to
appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so
innocently dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech
is vain.
Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of
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