with something like excitement that we saw the
beach and terrace suddenly blacken with attendant vassals, the king and
party embark, the boat (a man-of-war gig) come flying towards us dead
before the wind, and the royal coxswain lay us cleverly aboard, mount
the ladder with a jealous diffidence, and descend heavily on deck.

Not long ago he was overgrown with fat, obscured to view, and a burthen
to himself. Captains visiting the island advised him to walk; and though
it broke the habits of a life and the traditions of his rank, he
practised the remedy with benefit. His corpulence is now portable; you
would call him lusty rather than fat; but his gait is still dull,
stumbling, and elephantine. He neither stops nor hastens, but goes about
his business with an implacable deliberation. We could never see him and
not be struck with his extraordinary natural means for the theatre: a
beaked profile like Dante's in the mask, a mane of long black hair, the
eye brilliant, imperious, and inquiring: for certain parts, and to one
who could have used it, the face was a fortune. His voice matched it
well, being shrill, powerful, and uncanny, with a note like a
sea-bird's. Where there are no fashions, none to set them, few to follow
them if they were set, and none to criticise, he dresses--as Sir Charles
Grandison lived--"to his own heart." Now he wears a woman's frock, now a
naval uniform; now (and more usually) figures in a masquerade costume of
his own design: trousers and a singular jacket with shirt tails, the cut
and fit wonderful for island workmanship, the material always handsome,
sometimes green velvet, sometimes cardinal red silk. This masquerade
becomes him admirably. In the woman's frock he looks ominous and weird
beyond belief. I see him now come pacing towards me in the cruel sun,
solitary, a figure out of Hoffmann.

A visit on board ship, such as that at which we now assisted, makes a
chief part and by far the chief diversion of the life of Tembinok'. He
is not only the sole ruler, he is the sole merchant of his triple
kingdom, Apemama, Aranuka, and Kuria, well-planted islands. The taro
goes to the chiefs, who divide as they please among their immediate
adherents; but certain fish, turtles--which abound in Kuria,--and the
whole produce of the coco-palm, belong exclusively to Tembinok'. "A'
cobra[9] berong me," observed his majesty with, a wave of his hand; and
he counts and sells it by the houseful. "You got copra, king