The state of this folk, of whom I saw so little, I can merely guess at.  The king himself explains the situation with some art.  ’No; I no pay them,’ he once said.  ’I give them tobacco.  They work for me all the same brothers.’  It is true there was a brother once in Arden!  But we prefer the shorter word.  They bear every servile mark,—­levity like a child’s, incurable idleness, incurious content.  The insolence of the cook was a trait of his own; not so his levity, which he shared with the innocent Uncle Parker.  With equal unconcern both gambolled under the shadow of the gallows, and took liberties with death that might have surprised a careless student of man’s nature.  I wrote of Parker that he behaved like a boy of ten:  what was he else, being a slave of sixty?  He had passed all his years in school, fed, clad, thought for, commanded; and had grown familiar and coquetted with the fear of punishment.  By terror you may drive men long, but not far.  Here, in Apemama, they work at the constant and the instant peril of their lives; and are plunged in a kind of lethargy of laziness.  It is common to see one go afield in his stiff mat ungirt, so that he walks elbows-in like a trussed fowl; and whatsoever his right hand findeth to do, the other must be off duty holding on his clothes.  It is common to see two men carrying between them on a pole a single bucket of water.  To make two bites of a cherry is good enough:  to make two burthens of a soldier’s kit, for a distance of perhaps half a furlong, passes measure.  Woman, being the less childish animal, is less relaxed by servile conditions.  Even in the king’s absence, even when they were alone, I have seen Apemama women work with constancy.  But the outside to be hoped for in a man is that he may attack his task in little languid fits, and lounge between-whiles.  So I have seen a painter, with his pipe going, and a friend by the studio fireside.  You might suppose the race to lack civility, even vitality, until you saw them in the dance.  Night after night, and sometimes day after day, they rolled out their choruses in the great Speak House—­solemn andantes and adagios, led by the clapped hand, and delivered with an energy that shook the roof.  The time was not so slow, though it was slow for the islands; but I have chosen rather to indicate the effect upon the hearer.  Their music had a church-like character from near at hand, and seemed to European ears more regular than the run of island music.  Twice I have heard a discord regularly solved.  From farther off, heard at Equator Town for instance, the measures rose and fell and crepitated like the barking of hounds in a distant kennel.