“I decided to swim across the lagoon and leave him alone for a bit, until the affair blew over.  I shinned up the tallest palm-tree, and sat there thinking of it all.  I don’t suppose I ever felt so hurt by anything before or since.  It was the brutal ingratitude of the creature.  I’d been more than a brother to him.  I’d hatched him, educated him.  A great gawky, out-of-date bird!  And me a human being—­heir of the ages and all that.

“I thought after a time he’d begin to see things in that light himself, and feel a little sorry for his behaviour.  I thought if I was to catch some nice little bits of fish, perhaps, and go to him presently in a casual kind of way, and offer them to him, he might do the sensible thing.  It took me some time to learn how unforgiving and cantankerous an extinct bird can be.  Malice!

“I won’t tell you all the little devices I tried to get that bird round again.  I simply can’t.  It makes my cheek burn with shame even now to think of the snubs and buffets I had from this infernal curiosity.  I tried violence.  I chucked lumps of coral at him from a safe distance, but he only swallowed them.  I shied my open knife at him and almost lost it, though it was too big for him to swallow.  I tried starving him out and struck fishing, but he took to picking along the beach at low water after worms, and rubbed along on that.  Half my time I spent up to my neck in the lagoon, and the rest up the palm-trees.  One of them was scarcely high enough, and when he caught me up it he had a regular Bank Holiday with the calves of my legs.  It got unbearable.  I don’t know if you have ever tried sleeping up a palm-tree.  It gave me the most horrible nightmares.  Think of the shame of it, too!  Here was this extinct animal mooning about my island like a sulky duke, and me not allowed to rest the sole of my foot on the place.  I used to cry with weariness and vexation.  I told him straight that I didn’t mean to be chased about a desert island by any damned anachronisms.  I told him to go and peck a navigator of his own age.  But he only snapped his beak at me.  Great ugly bird—­all legs and neck!

“I shouldn’t like to say how long that went on altogether.  I’d have killed him sooner if I’d known how.  However, I hit on a way of settling him at last.  It is a South American dodge.  I joined all my fishing-lines together with stems of seaweed and things and made a stoutish string, perhaps twelve yards in length or more, and I fastened two lumps of coral rock to the ends of this.  It took me some time to do, because every now and then I had to go into the lagoon or up a tree as the fancy took me.  This I whirled rapidly round my head, and then let it go at him.  The first time I missed, but the next time the string caught his legs beautifully, and wrapped round them again and again.  Over he went.  I threw it standing waist-deep in the lagoon, and as soon as he went down I was out of the water and sawing at his neck with my knife ...