Capt. “Oh, that’s nothing.  They did that just for a little bit of fun.  The chief told me the day before that they never et anything but human beings.  He said his family consumed about three a day all the year round, counting holidays and Sundays.  He was a light eater himself, he said, on account of gitting dyspepsia from a tough Australian that he et in 1847, but the girls and the old woman, so he said, were very hearty eaters, and it kept him busy prowling around after human beings to satisfy ’em.  The old woman, he said, rather preferred to eat babies, on account of her teeth being poor, but the girls could eat the grizzliest sailor that ever went aboard ship.”

S.  “This is frightful.”

Capt.  “And the chief said sometimes the supply was scarce, but lately they had begun to depend more on imported goods than on the home products.  And they were better, anyhow, for all the folks preferred white meat.  He said the missionary societies were shipping them some nice lots of provender, and the tears came in his eyes when he said how good they were to the poor friendless savage away on a distant island.  He said he liked a missionary not too old or too young.  But let’s see; what’s your age, did you say?”

[Illustration:  MR. SPOONER IS ALARMED]

S.  “I am twenty-eight.”

Capt. “I think he mentioned twenty-seven; but howsomedever, he liked ’em old enough to be solid and young enough to be tender.  And he said he liked missionaries because they never used rum or tobacco and always kept their flavor.  I know I seen one young fellow who came out there from Boston.  He got up a camp-meeting in the woods; and while he was giving out the hymn, one of the congregation banged him on the head with a club, and in less than no time he was sizzling over a fire right in front of the pulpit.  They lit the fire with his hymn-book and kept her going with his sermons.  He was a man just about your build—­a little leaner’n you, maybe.  And they like a man to be stoutish.  He eats more tender.”

S.  “I had no idea that such awful practices existed.”

Capt.  “I haven’t told you half, for I don’t want to discourage you.  I know you mean well, and maybe they’ll let you alone.  But I remember, when I told the chief that there was a whole lot of you chaps studying to be missionaries, he laughed and rubbed his hands, and ordered the old woman to plant more horseradish and onions the following year.  He was a forehanded kind of a man for a mere pagan.  He said that if they would only give his tribe time, if they would send him along the supplies regular, so’s not to glut the market, they could put away the entire clergy of the United States and half the deacons without an effort.  He was nibbling at a missionary-bone when he spoke, and the old woman was making a new club out of another one.  They are an economical people.  They utilize everything.”