Our fifth attendant was no less a person than the royal cook.  He was strikingly handsome both in face and body, lazy as a slave, and insolent as a butcher’s boy.  He slept and smoked on our premises in various graceful attitudes; but so far from helping Ah Fu, he was not at the pains to watch him.  It may be said of him that he came to learn, and remained to teach; and his lessons were at times difficult to stomach.  For example, he was sent to fill a bucket from the well.  About half-way he found my wife watering her onions, changed buckets with her, and leaving her the empty, returned to the kitchen with the full.  On another occasion he was given a dish of dumplings for the king, was told they must be eaten hot, and that he should carry them as fast as possible.  The wretch set off at the rate of about a mile in the hour, head in air, toes turned out.  My patience, after a month of trial, failed me at the sight.  I pursued, caught him by his two big shoulders, and thrusting him before me, ran with him down the hill, over the sands, and through the applauding village, to the Speak House, where the king was then holding a pow-wow.  He had the impudence to pretend he was internally injured by my violence, and to profess serious apprehensions for his life.

All this we endured; for the ways of Tembinok’ are summary, and I was not yet ripe to take a hand in the man’s death.  But in the meanwhile, here was my unfortunate China boy slaving for the pair, and presently he fell sick.  I was now in the position of Cimondain Lantenac, and indeed all the characters in Quatre-Vingt-Treize:  to continue to spare the guilty, I must sacrifice the innocent.  I took the usual course and tried to save both, with the usual consequence of failure.  Well rehearsed, I went down to the palace, found the king alone, and obliged him with a vast amount of rigmarole.  The cook was too old to learn:  I feared he was not making progress; how if we had a boy instead?—­boys were more teachable.  It was all in vain; the king pierced through my disguises to the root of the fact; saw that the cook had desperately misbehaved; and sat a while glooming.  ’I think he tavvy too much,’ he said at last, with grim concision; and immediately turned the talk to other subjects.  The same day another high officer, the steward, appeared in the cook’s place, and, I am bound to say, proved civil and industrious.

As soon as I left, it seems the king called for a Winchester and strolled outside the palisade, awaiting the defaulter.  That day Tembinok’ wore the woman’s frock; as like as not, his make-up was completed by a pith helmet and blue spectacles.  Conceive the glaring stretch of sandhills, the dwarf palms with their noon-day shadows, the line of the palisade, the crone sentries (each by a small clear fire) cooking syrup on their posts—­and this chimaera waiting with his deadly engine.  To him, enter at last the cook, strolling down the sandhill