"Oh, my pipe you mean; but look at the difference; mosquitoes bite human beings, they don't eat them!"
"And, you may add, their skins don't make bed-clothes. Besides, if my mother takes rheumatism or the ague, it will be you that is to blame."
"I would rather face all the tigers in Bengal and all the lions in Africa than incur such a responsibility. I will, therefore, take a part in your cruise, and if any accident happens to either of you, I shall stay in the forest till nothing is left of me but my cap and my bones. In this way I will escape all reproach in this world, and I may as well, after all, rejoin my old commander, Captain Littlestone, by this road as by any other."
In the meantime, they had reached the coast of Waldeck, and having landed, they found the outhouses and sheds that had been erected there in satisfactory order; the apes had not forgotten a battue that had once been got up for their special behoof, as not an individual was to be seen in the neighborhood. A morass of the district that had been converted into a rice plantation, promised an abundant crop; and the cotton plants, that Frank had once mistaken for flakes of snow, reared their woolly blossoms, looking for all the world like the powdered heads of our ancestors. After a slight repast, the pinnace was once more in motion, and the party steering for Prospect Hill.
"Ah," sighed Willis, "I wish we had only Sir Marmaduke Travers' cage here."
"Cage!" cried Fritz, laughing, "what, to shut up the game first and shoot it afterwards?" "No, quite the reverse: to shut up the hunters."
"Ah, you would serve us in the same way as Louis XI. served Cardinal Balue."
"I know nothing of either Louis XI. or Cardinal Balue; but the cage I speak of was an excellent invention, for all that."
"Which you would like to prove to us by caging ourselves, eh?"
"Sir Marmaduke Travers," continued Willis, "was an English gentleman, and he was travelling in Coromandel, no one knew why or for what purpose."