And then in that 'are latitude it a'n't just the way 'tis here; you
don't work; you get easy, and lazy, and sleepy; somethin' in the air
kind of hushes you up; it makes you sweat to think, and you're too hazy
to, if it didn't; and you don't care for nothing much but food and
drink. I hadn't no spunk left; so I married her after their fashion, and
I liked her well enough; and she was my wife, after all.

"I tell ye, Doctor, it goes a gret way with men-folks to think
anything's their'n, and nobody else's. But when I married her, I took
the chain with Hetty Buel's ring off my neck, and put 'em in a shell,
and buried the shell under my doorway. I couldn't have Wailua touch
that.

"So there I lived fifteen long year, as it might be, in a kind of a
curus dream, doin' nothin' much, only that when I got to know the tongue
them savages spoke, little by little I got pretty much the steerin' o'
the hull crew, till by-'n'-by some of 'em got jealous, and plotted and
planned to kill me, because the king, Wailua's father, was gettin' old,
and they thought I wanted to be king when he died, and they couldn't
stan' that no way.

"Somehow or other Wailua got word of what was goin' on, and one night
she woke me out of sleep an' told me I must run for't, and she would
hide me safe till things took a turn. So I scratched up the shell with
Hetty's ring in't, and afore morning I was over t'other side of the
island, in a kind of a cave overlookin' the sea, near by to a grove of
bananas and mammee apples, and not fur from the harbor where I'd landed;
and safe enough, for nobody but Wailua knew the way to't.

"Well, the sixth day I sot in the porthole of that cave I see a sail in