“Ships didn’t never touch there, I knew by their ways, their wonderin’ and takin’ sights at me.  As for Cap’en Twist, he wouldn’t come back for his own father, unless he was short o’ hands for whalin’.  I was in for life, no doubt on’t; and I’d better look at the fair-weather side of the thing.  The island was as pretty a bit of land as ever lay betwixt sea and sky; full of tall cocoa-nut palms, with broad, feathery tops, and bunches of brown nuts; bananas hung in yellow clumps ready to drop off at a touch; and big bread-fruit trees stood about everywhere, lookin’ as though a punkin-vine had climbed up into ’em and hung half-ripe punkins off of every bough; beside lots of other trees that the natives set great store by, and live on the fruit of ’em; and flyin’ through all, such pretty birds as you never see except in them parts; but one brown thrasher’d beat the whole on ’em singin’; fact is, they run to feathers; they don’t sing none.

“It was as sightly a country as ever Adam and Eve had to themselves; but it wa’n’t home.  Howsomever, after a while the savages took to me mightily.  I was allers handy with tools, and by good luck I’d come off with two jack-knives and a loose awl in my jacket-pocket, so I could beat ’em all at whittlin’; and I made figgers on their bows an’ pipe-stems, of things they never see,—­roosters, and horses, Miss Buel’s old sleigh, and the Albany stage, driver’n’ all, and our yoke of oxen a-ploughin’,—­till nothin’ would serve them but I should have a house o’ my own, and be married to their king’s daughter; so I did.

“Well, Doctor, you kinder wonder I forgot Hetty Buel.  I didn’t forget her, but I knew she wa’n’t to be had anyhow; I thought I was in for life; and Wailua was the prettiest little craft that ever you set eyes on, as straight as a spar, and as kindly as a Christian; and besides, I had to, or I’d have been killed, and broiled, and eaten, whether or no!  And then in that ’are latitude it a’n’t just the way ’tis here; you don’t work; you get easy, and lazy, and sleepy; somethin’ in the air kind of hushes you up; it makes you sweat to think, and you’re too hazy to, if it didn’t; and you don’t care for nothing much but food and drink.  I hadn’t no spunk left; so I married her after their fashion, and I liked her well enough; and she was my wife, after all.

“I tell ye, Doctor, it goes a gret way with men-folks to think anything’s their’n, and nobody else’s.  But when I married her, I took the chain with Hetty Buel’s ring off my neck, and put ’em in a shell, and buried the shell under my doorway.  I couldn’t have Wailua touch that.

“So there I lived fifteen long year, as it might be, in a kind of a curus dream, doin’ nothin’ much, only that when I got to know the tongue them savages spoke, little by little I got pretty much the steerin’ o’ the hull crew, till by-’n’-by some of ’em got jealous, and plotted and planned to kill me, because the king, Wailua’s father, was gettin’ old, and they thought I wanted to be king when he died, and they couldn’t stan’ that no way.