The glistening black woman stepped forward, but the head-man stopped her.  There was some mistake here.  He had killed the best dog in the village for Captain Kettle’s meal, and his guest for some fastidious reason refused to eat.  He pointed angrily to the figured bowl.  “Dug chop,” said he.  “Too-much-good.  You chop him.”  This rejection of excellent food was a distinct slur on his menage, and he was working himself up into passion.  “You chop dem dug chop one-time,” he repeated.

The situation was growing strained, and might well culminate in fisticuffs.  But Captain Kettle, during his recent many months’ sojourn as a lone white man in savage Africa, had acquired one thing which had never burdened him much before, and that was tact.  He did not openly resent the imperative tone of his host, which any one who had known him previously would have guessed to be his first impulse.  But neither at the same time did he permit himself to be forced into eating the noxious meal.  He temporized.  With that queer polyglot called Coast English, and with shreds from a score of native dialects, he made up a tattered fabric of speech which beguiled the head-man back again into good humor; and presently that one-eyed savage squatted amicably down on his heels, and gave an order to one of his wives in attendance.

The lady brought Kettle’s accordion, and the little sailor propped his back against the wattle wall of the hut, and made music, and lifted up his voice in song.  The tune carried among the lanes and dwellings of the village, and naked feet pad-padded quickly up over dust and the grass; the audience distributed itself within and without the head-man’s hut, and listened enrapt; and the head-man felt the glow of satisfaction that a London hostess feels when she has hired for money the most popular drawing-room entertainer of the day, and her guests condescend to enjoy, and not merely to exhibit themselves as blases.

But Captain Kettle, it must be confessed, felt none of the artist’s pride in finding his art appreciated.  He had always the South Shields chapel at the back of his mind, with its austere code and creed, and he felt keenly the degradation of lowering himself to the level of the play-actor; even though he was earning his bare existence—­and had been doing all through the heart of barbarous Africa—­by mumming and carolling to tribes whose trade was murder and cannibalism.

He felt an infinite pity for himself when he reflected that many a time nothing but a breakdown, or a loudly bawled hymn, or a series of twisted faces, had been the only thing which stood between him and the cooking fires.  But there was no help for it.  He was a fighting man, but he could not do battle with a continent; and so he had either to take the only course which remained, and lower himself (as he considered it) to the level of the music-hall pariah, and mouth and mow to amuse the mob, or else accept the alternative which even the bravest of men might well shrink from in dismay.