y 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 sand-hills, 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
from Equator Town, listless, vain and graceful; with no thought of
alarm. As soon as he was well within range, the travestied monarch fired
the six shots over his head, at his feet, and on either hand of him: the
second Apemama warning, startling in itself, fatal in significance, for
the next time his majesty will aim to hit. I am told the king is a crack
shot; that when he aims to kill, the grave may be got ready; and when he
aims misses by so near a margin that the culprit tastes six times the
bitterness of death. The effect upon the cook I had an opportunity of
seeing for myself. My wife and I were returning from the sea-side of the
island, when we spied one coming to meet us at a very quick, disordered
pace, between a walk and a run. As we drew nearer we saw it was the
cook, beside himself with some emotion, his usual warm, mulatto colour
declined into a bluish pallor. He passed us without word or gesture,
staring on us with the face of a Satan, an