"Friend, as one cup serves for all, so does the same story serve for all.... The cup will shortly circulate from lip to lip, and the story from ear to ear.... But now tell me, what is that brass belt for that I see hanging yonder?"
"Have you not also in your country the belt of agility?"
"Here, with us, at every new moon, the lads of each tribe come to the chief and try on the belt, in order to prove that their girth has not broadened with self-indulgence, and that they have preserved themselves agile and nimble. Those who cannot hitch the belt around themselves, are hissed, are pointed at with derision, and must pay a fine. Accordingly, all see to their stomachs lest they come to look like a leathern bottle on two skittles."
"A good custom. I regret it fell into disuse in my province. And what is the purpose of that big old trunk? It is of precious wood and seems to have seen many years."
"Very many. That is the family trunk of triumph," answered Joel opening the trunk, in which the stranger saw many whitened skulls. One of them, sawn in two, was mounted on a brass foot like a cup.
"These are, no doubt, the heads of enemies who have been killed by your fathers, friend Joel? With us this sort of family charnel houses has long been abandoned."
"With us also. I preserve these heads only out of respect for my ancestors. Since more than two hundred years, the prisoners of war are no longer mutilated. The habit existed in the days of the kings whom Ritha-Gaür shaved of their hair, as you mentioned before, to make himself a blouse out of their beards. Those were gay days of barbarism, were those days of royalty. I heard my grandfather Kirio say that even as late as in the days of his father, Tiras, the men who went to war returned to their tribes carrying the heads of their enemies stuck to the points of their lances, or trailed by the hair from the breast-plates of their horses. They were then nailed to the doors of the houses for trophies, just as you see yonder on the wall the heads of wild animals."
"With us, in olden days, friend Joel, these trophies were also preserved, but preserved in cedar oil when they were the heads of a hostile chieftain."
"By Hesus! Cedar oil!... What magnificence!" exclaimed Joel smiling. "That is the way our wives reason: 'for good fish, good sauce.'"