d was his agricultural science that the vulgar only accounted
for his admirable produce by a miraculous fecundity! The proprietor of
these hundred golden acres was a rather mysterious sort of personage. He
was an aboriginal inhabitant, and, though the only one of the aborigines
in existence, had lived many centuries, and, to the consternation of
some of the Vraibleusians and the exultation of others, exhibited no
signs of decay. This awful being was without a name. When spoken of by
his admirers he was generally described by such panegyrical periphrases
as 'soul of the country,' 'foundation of the State,' 'the only real,
and true, and substantial being;' while, on the other hand, those who
presumed to differ from those sentiments were in the habit of styling
him 'the dead weight,' 'the vampire,' 'the night-mare,' and other titles
equally complimentary. They also maintained that, instead of being
either real or substantial, he was, in fact, the most flimsy and
fictitious personage in the whole island; and then, lashing themselves
up into metaphor, they would call him a meteor, or a vapour, or a great
windy bubble, that would some day burst.

The Aboriginal insisted that it was the common law of the land that the
islanders should purchase their corn only of him. They grumbled, but
he growled; he swore that it was the constitution of the country; that
there was an uninterrupted line of precedents to confirm the claim; and
that, if they did not approve of the arrangement, they and their fathers
should not have elected to have settled, or presumed to have been
spawned, upon his island. Then, as if he were not desirous of resting
his claim on its mere legal merits, he would remind them of the
superiority of his grain, and the impossibility of a scarcity, in the
event of which calamity an insular people could always find a plentiful
though temporary resource in sea-weed. He then clearly proved to them
that, if ever they had the imprudence to change any of their old laws,
they would necessarily never have more than one meal a day as long as
they lived. Finally, he recalled to their recollection that he had made
the island what it was, that he was their mainstay, and that his counsel
and exertions had rendered them the wonder of the world. Thus, between
force, and fear, and flattery, the Vraibleusians paid for their corn
nearly its weight in gold; but what did that signify to a nation with so
many pink shells!

CHAPTER 9