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

<<BackPagesTo menuNext>>
 
 

peking2008