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Updated: May 29, 2025
More than once during the evening she tried to introduce serious subjects, telling me that I must always live with them, learn to shoot the birds and catch the fishes, and have a wife; and then she would speak of her granddaughter Oalava, whose virtues it was proper to mention, but whose physical charms needed no description since they had never been concealed.
"Once you said that Oalava would be given to me for a wife," I began. "Some day I shall want a wife." He nodded approval, and remarked sententiously that the desire to possess a wife was common to all men. "What has been left to me?" I said despondingly and spreading out my hands. "My pistol gone, and did I not give Runi the tinder-box, and the little box with a cock painted on it to you?
I could not see a green parrot sitting silent and motionless amidst the green foliage as they could; I had not their preternatural keenness of sight; and, in like manner, to deceive with lies and false seeming was their faculty and not mine. He fell readily into the trap. My return to practical subjects pleased him. He bade me hope that Oalava might yet be mine in spite of my poverty.
He replied that there would be no difficulty: that Runi would give his consent, as would also Otawinki, Piake, and other relations; and last, and LEAST, according to the matrimonial customs of these latitudes, Oalava herself would be ready to bestow her person queyou, worn figleaf-wise, necklace of accouri teeth, and all on so worthy a suitor as myself.
Besides Runi, there were, in our little community, two oldish men, his cousins I believe, who had wives and grown-up children. Another family consisted of Piake, Runi's nephew, his brother Kua-ko about whom there will be much to say and a sister Oalava. Piake had a wife and two children; Kua-ko was unmarried and about nineteen or twenty years old; Oalava was the youngest of the three.
And by and by he spoke of something else more wonderful even than the promise of a blow-pipe, with arrows galore, and this was that young sister of his, whose name was Oalava, a maid of about sixteen, shy and silent and mild-eyed, rather lean and dirty; not ugly, nor yet prepossessing. And this copper-coloured little drab of the wilderness he proposed to bestow in marriage on me!
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