But I should tell you (what made the thing more curious) that all the time the Tyrolean harps were harping round me in the trees, and even while I looked, a green-and-yellow bird (that, I suppose, was building) began to tear the hair off the head of one of the figures.

A little farther on I found the best curiosity of the museum.  The first I saw of it was a longish mound of earth with a twist to it.  Digging off the earth with my hands, I found underneath tarpaulin stretched on boards, so that this was plainly the roof of a cellar.  It stood right on the top of the hill, and the entrance was on the far side, between two rocks, like the entrance to a cave.  I went as far in as the bend, and, looking round the corner, saw a shining face.  It was big and ugly, like a pantomime mask, and the brightness of it waxed and dwindled, and at times it smoked.

“Oho!” says I, “luminous paint!”

And I must say I rather admired the man’s ingenuity.  With a box of tools and a few mighty simple contrivances he had made out to have a devil of a temple.  Any poor Kanaka brought up here in the dark, with the harps whining all round him, and shown that smoking face in the bottom of a hole, would make no kind of doubt but he had seen and heard enough devils for a lifetime.  It’s easy to find out what Kanakas think.  Just go back to yourself any way round from ten to fifteen years old, and there’s an average Kanaka.  There are some pious, just as there are pious boys; and the most of them, like the boys again, are middling honest and yet think it rather larks to steal, and are easy scared and rather like to be so.  I remember a boy I was at school with at home who played the Case business.  He didn’t know anything, that boy; he couldn’t do anything; he had no luminous paint and no Tyrolean harps; he just boldly said he was a sorcerer, and frightened us out of our boots, and we loved it.  And then it came in my mind how the master had once flogged that boy, and the surprise we were all in to see the sorcerer catch it and burn like anybody else.  Thinks I to myself, “I must find some way of fixing it so for Master Case.”  And the next moment I had my idea.

I went back by the path, which, when once you had found it, was quite plain and easy walking; and when I stepped out on the black sands, who should I see but Master Case himself.  I cocked my gun and held it handy, and we marched up and passed without a word, each keeping the tail of his eye on the other; and no sooner had we passed than we each wheeled round like fellows drilling, and stood face to face.  We had each taken the same notion in his head, you see, that the other fellow might give him the load of his gun in the stern.

“You’ve shot nothing,” says Case.

“I’m not on the shoot to-day,” said I.

“Well, the devil go with you for me,” says he.

“The same to you,” says I.

But we stuck just the way we were; no fear of either of us moving.