parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face,
his back, too, was all over the same dark squares;
he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just
escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.
Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark
green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.
It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage
or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas,
and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.
A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers.
He might take a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went
about something that completely fascinated my attention,
and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen.
Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught,
which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets,
and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch
on its back, and exactly the color of a three days' old Congo baby.
Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this
black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner.
But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened
a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must
be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be.
For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place,
and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little
hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons.
The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty,
so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little
shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.