or jest with them, his voice sounding shrilly from the cabin.  By his side he may have the heir-apparent, Paul, his nephew and adopted son, six years old, stark naked, and a model of young human beauty.  And there will always be the favourite and perhaps two other wives awake; four more lying supine under mats and whelmed in slumber.  Or perhaps we came later, fell on a more private hour, and found Tembinok’ retired in the house with the favourite, an earthenware spittoon, a leaden inkpot, and a commercial ledger.  In the last, lying on his belly, he writes from day to day the uneventful history of his reign; and when thus employed he betrayed a touch of fretfulness on interruption with which I was well able to sympathise.  The royal annalist once read me a page or so, translating as he went; but the passage being genealogical, and the author boggling extremely in his version, I own I have been sometimes better entertained.  Nor does he confine himself to prose, but touches the lyre, too, in his leisure moments, and passes for the chief bard of his kingdom, as he is its sole public character, leading architect, and only merchant.

His competence, however, does not reach to music; and his verses, when they are ready, are taught to a professional musician, who sets them and instructs the chorus.  Asked what his songs were about, Tembinok’ replied, ’Sweethearts and trees and the sea.  Not all the same true, all the same lie.’  For a condensed view of lyrical poetry (except that he seems to have forgot the stars and flowers) this would be hard to mend.  These multifarious occupations bespeak (in a native and an absolute prince) unusual activity of mind.

The palace court at noon is a spot to be remembered with awe, the visitor scrambling there, on the loose stones, through a splendid nightmare of light and heat; but the sweep of the wind delivers it from flies and mosquitoes; and with the set of sun it became heavenly.  I remember it best on moonless nights.  The air was like a bath of milk.  Countless shining stars were overhead, the lagoon paved with them.  Herds of wives squatted by companies on the gravel, softly chatting.  Tembinok’ would doff his jacket, and sit bare and silent, perhaps meditating songs; the favourite usually by him, silent also.  Meanwhile in the midst of the court, the palace lanterns were being lit and marshalled in rank upon the ground—­six or eight square yards of them; a sight that gave one strange ideas of the number of ‘my pamily’:  such a sight as may be seen about dusk in a corner of some great terminus at home.  Presently these fared off into all corners of the precinct, lighting the last labours of the day, lighting one after another to their rest that prodigious company of women.  A few lingered in the middle of the court for the card-party, and saw the honours shuffled and dealt, and Tembinok’ deliberating between his two; hands, and the queens losing their tobacco.  Then these also were scattered