“And now good-morning to you, my fine fellow, and the devil go with you for me!” said the man.

“Hold on,” said Keawe, “I don’t want any more of this fun.  Here, take your bottle back.”

“You have bought it for less than I paid for it,” replied the man, rubbing his hands.  “It is yours now; and, for my part, I am only concerned to see the back of you.”  And with that he rang for his Chinese servant, and had Keawe shown out of the house.

Now, when Keawe was in the street, with the bottle under his arm, he began to think.  “If all is true about this bottle, I may have made a losing bargain,” thinks he.  “But perhaps the man was only fooling me.”  The first thing he did was to count his money; the sum was exact — forty-nine dollars American money, and one Chili piece.  “That looks like the truth,” said Keawe.  “Now I will try another part.”

The streets in that part of the city were as clean as a ship’s decks, and though it was noon, there were no passengers.  Keawe set the bottle in the gutter and walked away.  Twice he looked back, and there was the milky, round-bellied bottle where he left it.  A third time he looked back, and turned a corner; but he had scarce done so, when something knocked upon his elbow, and behold! it was the long neck sticking up; and as for the round belly, it was jammed into the pocket of his pilot-coat.

“And that looks like the truth,” said Keawe.

The next thing he did was to buy a cork-screw in a shop, and go apart into a secret place in the fields.  And there he tried to draw the cork, but as often as he put the screw in, out it came again, and the cork as whole as ever.

“This is some new sort of cork,” said Keawe, and all at once he began to shake and sweat, for he was afraid of that bottle.

On his way back to the port-side, he saw a shop where a man sold shells and clubs from the wild islands, old heathen deities, old coined money, pictures from China and Japan, and all manner of things that sailors bring in their sea-chests.  And here he had an idea.  So he went in and offered the bottle for a hundred dollars.  The man of the shop laughed at him at the first, and offered him five; but, indeed, it was a curious bottle — such glass was never blown in any human glassworks, so prettily the colours shone under the milky white, and so strangely the shadow hovered in the midst; so, after he had disputed awhile after the manner of his kind, the shop-man gave Keawe sixty silver dollars for the thing, and set it on a shelf in the midst of his window.

“Now,” said Keawe, “I have sold that for sixty which I bought for fifty — or, to say truth, a little less, because one of my dollars was from Chili.  Now I shall know the truth upon another point.”

So he went back on board his ship, and, when he opened his chest, there was the bottle, and had come more quickly than himself.  Now Keawe had a mate on board whose name was Lopaka.