his job of tanning.

The next time he was given a black breakfast, he wrote his hurry-call
message and corked it into the flask. And there only remained the
somewhat herculean task of getting that flask flung into the sea.

You'll never believe how it got there finally. But I'll tell you for all
that. A creek flowed near the dungeon in which the famous tenor was
incarcerated. And one night of cloud-burst that creek burst its
cerements, banks I mean, filled the singing man's prison in two jerks of
a lamb's tail, and floated both him and his flask out of it. He grounded
as usual, but the flask must have been rushed down to the sea. For in
the sea it was found, calmly bobbing, and less than two years later. A
nigger fisherman found it, and gave it to me, in exchange for a
Waterbury watch. He tried to make me take his daughter instead, but I
wouldn't.

Signor What-you-would-forget-if-I-told-you wasn't put back in his
dungeon till the rainy season was at an end. Instead he was picketed. A
rope ran from his wrists, which were tied behind his back, and was
inserted through the handles (it had a pair of them like ears just above
the trunnions) of a small bronze cannon, that had Magellan's name and
the arms of Spain engraved around the touch-hole. And thus picketed, he
was rained on, joked on, and abused until dry weather. Then, it was the
first happiness that he had had among them, they served him one day with
a new kind of fish that had begun to run in the creek. It tasted like
Carlton sole, he said. And it made him feel so good that, being quite by
himself and the morning blue and warm, he began, sitting on his little
cannon, to hum an aria. Further inspirited by his own tunefulness, he
rose (and of course struck an attitude) and opened his mouth and sang.

Oh, how good it was to hear--as he put it himself--after all those
months of silence!

Well, the people he belonged to came running up with eyes like saucers
and mouths open, and they squatted at his feet in a semicircle, and
women came and children. They had wonder in their faces and fear. Last
came the old chief, who was too old to walk, and was carried always in a
chair which two of his good-natured sons-in-law made with their hands.
And the old chief, when he had listened awhile with his little bald
monkey head cocked on one side, signed to be put down. And he stood on
his feet and walked.

And he took out a little khris and walked over to the Divo, and cut the