I might now go home, leaving that fire-lit family party gloating over their new millions, and consider my strange day.  I had tried and rewarded the virtue of Terutak’.  I had played the millionaire, had behaved abominably, and then in some degree repaired my thoughtlessness.  And now I had my box, and could open it and look within.  It contained a miniature sleeping-mat and a white shell.  Tamaiti, interrogated next day as to the shell, explained it was not exactly Chench, but a cell, or body, which he would at times inhabit.  Asked why there was a sleeping-mat, he retorted indignantly, ‘Why have you mats?’ And this was the sceptical Tamaiti!  But island scepticism is never deeper than the lips.

CHAPTER VII—­THE KING OF APEMAMA

Thus all things on the island, even the priests of the gods, obey the word of Tembinok’.  He can give and take, and slay, and allay the scruples of the conscientious, and do all things (apparently) but interfere in the cookery of a turtle.  ‘I got power’ is his favourite word; it interlards his conversation; the thought haunts him and is ever fresh; and when be has asked and meditates of foreign countries, he looks up with a smile and reminds you, ’I got power.’  Nor is his delight only in the possession, but in the exercise.  He rejoices in the crooked and violent paths of kingship like a strong man to run a race, or like an artist in his art.  To feel, to use his power, to embellish his island and the picture of the island life after a private ideal, to milk the island vigorously, to extend his singular museum—­these employ delightfully the sum of his abilities.  I never saw a man more patently in the right trade.

It would be natural to suppose this monarchy inherited intact through generations.  And so far from that, it is a thing of yesterday.  I was already a boy at school while Apemama was yet republican, ruled by a noisy council of Old Men, and torn with incurable feuds.  And Tembinok’ is no Bourbon; rather the son of a Napoleon.  Of course he is well-born.  No man need aspire high in the isles of the Pacific unless his pedigree be long and in the upper regions mythical.  And our king counts cousinship with most of the high families in the archipelago, and traces his descent to a shark and a heroic woman.  Directed by an oracle, she swam beyond sight of land to meet her revolting paramour, and received at sea the seed of a predestined family.  ‘I think lie,’ is the king’s emphatic commentary; yet he is proud of the legend.  From this illustrious beginning the fortunes of the race must have declined; and Tenkoruti, the grandfather of Tembinok’, was the chief of a village at the north end of the island.  Kuria and Aranuka were yet independent; Apemama itself the arena of devastating feuds.  Through this perturbed period of history the figure of Tenkoruti stalks memorable.  In war he was swift and bloody; several towns fell to his spear,