Captain Saltmarsh—­“Come, now, cat your anchor, lad—­you’re heaving too taut.  You promised to show me that stunner, and I walked more than eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle I ever see, a hunting for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn’t as big around as a beer cask, and you know that your own self, Markiss.”

“Hear the man talk!  Of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn’t I explain it?  Answer me, didn’t I?  Didn’t I say I wished you could have seen it when I first saw it?  When you got up on your ear and called me names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling, didn’t I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?  And did you s’pose the tree could last for-ever, con-found it?  I don’t see why you want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that’s never done you any harm.”

Somehow this man’s presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands, desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found trespassing on his grounds.

I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement I was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances, and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a familiar voice chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said: 

“But, my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse, or the circumstance either—­nothing in the world!  I mean no sort of offence when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about speed.  Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta; there was a beast!—­there was lightning for you!  Trot!  Trot is no name for it—­she flew!  How she could whirl a buggy along!  I started her out once, sir—­Colonel Bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well —­I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of eighteen miles!  It did, by the everlasting hills!  And I’m telling you nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single drop of rain fell on me—­not a single drop, sir!  And I swear to it!  But my dog was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!”

For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet this person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me.  But one evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a sociable time.  About ten o’clock I chanced to be talking about a merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his workmen.  Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot—­and for a moment I trembled on the imminent verge of profanity: