’By means of this simple formality Stein inherited the Scotsman’s privileged position and all his stock-in-trade, together with a fortified house on the banks of the only navigable river in the country.  Shortly afterwards the old queen, who was so free in her speech, died, and the country became disturbed by various pretenders to the throne.  Stein joined the party of a younger son, the one of whom thirty years later he never spoke otherwise but as “my poor Mohammed Bonso.”  They both became the heroes of innumerable exploits; they had wonderful adventures, and once stood a siege in the Scotsman’s house for a month, with only a score of followers against a whole army.  I believe the natives talk of that war to this day.  Meantime, it seems, Stein never failed to annex on his own account every butterfly or beetle he could lay hands on.  After some eight years of war, negotiations, false truces, sudden outbreaks, reconciliation, treachery, and so on, and just as peace seemed at last permanently established, his “poor Mohammed Bonso” was assassinated at the gate of his own royal residence while dismounting in the highest spirits on his return from a successful deer-hunt.  This event rendered Stein’s position extremely insecure, but he would have stayed perhaps had it not been that a short time afterwards he lost Mohammed’s sister ("my dear wife the princess,” he used to say solemnly), by whom he had had a daughter—­mother and child both dying within three days of each other from some infectious fever.  He left the country, which this cruel loss had made unbearable to him.  Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence.  What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.  He had a little money; he started life afresh, and in the course of years acquired a considerable fortune.  At first he had travelled a good deal amongst the islands, but age had stolen upon him, and of late he seldom left his spacious house three miles out of town, with an extensive garden, and surrounded by stables, offices, and bamboo cottages for his servants and dependants, of whom he had many.  He drove in his buggy every morning to town, where he had an office with white and Chinese clerks.  He owned a small fleet of schooners and native craft, and dealt in island produce on a large scale.  For the rest he lived solitary, but not misanthropic, with his books and his collection, classing and arranging specimens, corresponding with entomologists in Europe, writing up a descriptive catalogue of his treasures.  Such was the history of the man whom I had come to consult upon Jim’s case without any definite hope.  Simply to hear what he would have to say would have been a relief.  I was very anxious, but I respected the intense, almost passionate, absorption with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous markings, he could see other things, an image of something as perishable and defying destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues displaying a splendour unmarred by death.