United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The air was like a bath of milk. Countless shining stars were overhead, the lagoon paved with them. Herds of wives squatted by companies on the gravel, softly chatting. Tembinok' would doff his jacket, and sit bare and silent, perhaps meditating songs; the favourite usually by him, silent also.
The immediate shores of the lagoon are windy and blinding; Tembinok' himself is glad to grope blue-spectacled on his terrace; and we fled the neighbourhood of the red conjunctiva, the suppurating eyeball, and the beggar who pursues and beseeches the passing foreigner for eye wash.
I doubt if you could find a man in Europe so bold as to attempt this piece of tact and government. And seemingly Tembinok' himself had trouble in the beginning. I hear of him shooting at a wife for some levity on board a schooner. Doubtless his growing years have come to his assistance; for upon so large a scale it is more easy to play the father than the husband.
He perceived too late that his persistence was unmannerly; hung his head a while in silence; then, lifting up a sheepish countenance, 'I 'shamed, said the tyrant. It was the first and the last time we heard him own to a flaw in his behaviour. Half an hour after he sent us a camphor-wood chest worth only a few dollars but then heaven knows what Tembinok' had paid for it.
Even the redoubtable Tembinok, with forty boats full of armed savages, had been stemmed in his Napoleonic career and turned back by her from his projected invasion of Apiang presenting the missionary's wife, on his departure, with a gold-inlaid Winchester that was the apple of his eye. "I shall make Karaitch smart for this!" she said vindictively.
'I think lie, is the king's emphatic commentary; yet he is proud of the legend. From this illustrious beginning the fortunes of the race must have declined; and Tenkoruti, the grandfather of Tembinok', was the chief of a village at the north end of the island. Kuria and Aranuka were yet independent; Apemama itself the arena of devastating feuds.
Then Tembinok' would raise his voice and speak shrilly and briefly. There was never a response in words; but if the speech were jesting, there came by way of answer discreet, obsequious laughter- -such laughter as we hear in schoolrooms; and if it were practical, the sudden uprising and departure of the squad. In all the affair servile obedience was no less remarkable than servile deliberation.
It is strange I should have never heard a more winning sound of speech, yet the dialect should be one remarkable for violent, ugly, and outlandish vocables; so that Tembinok' himself declared it made him weary, and professed to find repose in talking English. The state of this folk, of whom I saw so little, I can merely guess at. The king himself explains the situation with some art.
The outward and visible sign of this glamour was no more than a few ragged coco-leaf garlands round the stems of the outlying palms; but its significance reposed on the tremendous sanction of the tapu and the guns of Tembinok'.
Osbourne landed, found nothing done, and carried his complaint to Tembinok'. He heard it, rose, called for a Winchester, stepped without the royal palisade, and fired two shots in the air.
Word Of The Day