laces till he had taken a
kind of rude throne in the circle.

For my part, I was obliged to stand alone in their midst, and it seemed
that they were debating about myself and my future treatment. First the
old priest, whom I had seen on the night before, got up, and, as I
fancied, his harangue was very unfavourable to me. He pointed at the
inevitable flower-crowned altar which, of course, was in the centre of
the market-place, and from the way he shook a sickle he held in his hand
I believe that he was proposing to sacrifice me on the spot. In the
midst of his oration two vultures, black with white breasts, flew high
over our heads, chasing a dove, which they caught and killed right above
the market-place, so that the feathers fell down on the altar. The
islanders, as I afterwards discovered, are full of childish superstitions
about the flight of birds, from which they derive omens as to future
events. The old priest manifestly attempted to make political capital
against me out of the interesting occurrence in natural history which we
had just observed. He hurried to the altar, caught up a handful of the
bleeding feathers, and, with sickle in hand, was rushing towards me, when
he tripped over the head of a bullock that had lately been sacrificed,
and fell flat on his face, while the sickle flew far out of his hand.

On this the young men, who were very frivolous, like most of the
islanders, laughed aloud, and even the elders smiled. The chief now rose
with his staff in his grasp, and, pointing first to me and then to the
sky, was, I imagined, propounding a different interpretation of the omen
from that advanced by the old priest. Meantime the latter, with a sulky
expression of indifference, sat nursing his knees, which had been a good
deal damaged by his unseemly sprawl on the ground. When the chief sat
down, a very quiet, absent-minded old gentleman arose. Elatreus was his
name, as I learned later; his family had a curious history, and he
himself afterwards came to an unhappy and terrible end, as will be shown
in a subsequent part of my narrative.

I felt quite at home, as if I had been at some vestry-meeting, or some
committee in the old country, when Elatreus got up. He was stout, very
bald, and had a way of thrusting his arm behind him, and of humming and
hawing, which vividly brought back to mind the oratory of my native land.
He had also, plainly enough, the trick of forgetting what he intended to
say