Here they were more successful. Although the canoes held aloof for a time, yet by a display of kindness, and by sending them presents, which had first to be left on the beach, the savages became gradually more and more bold. At last the king himself paid the ship a visit. He came unarmed and almost alone, explaining to the captain through Quambo that he knew the white men were all-powerful, and that if they chose to slay him they could find him wherever he happened to hide.
His majesty marvelled very much at all he saw, especially at the firearms and the telescope. When invited to look through this at his distant palace on the hills, he did so with fear and even superstitious dread. Why yonder squatted his favourite wife in front of the palace door, so very near that he could apparently almost touch her and talk to her!
And Captain Cawdor made him a gift of one of these telescopes, or magic glasses as he called them, fixing it for him at the right focus.
The king got even chatty and garrulous at last; and when Fred made him look through the glass with the wrong end towards him, and he saw his wife reduced in size to a mere midget, and so very far away, his merriment was as boisterous as that of an infant-school-boy.
He had plenty to eat and drink on board, and went away at last dressed in a scarlet robe—it really was a spare dressing-gown of Señor Sarpinto's—and loaded with presents. I do not believe there was a happier king in all the South Pacific Ocean.
The men of the San Salvador could now go on shore without fear of molestation, and all but unarmed.
One day the king brought his queen on board, and Toddie presided at the tea-table on the quarter-deck. There was chocolate as well as tea, and it was a good thing there was, for as soon as the queen had taken a huge gulp of tea she found she did not like the flavour of it; so she simply gaped, and it all ran out again over her robe of cocoa-fibre. But she liked the cocoa, and passed her cup fifteen times in succession, for Cassia-bud assured Fred he had counted every cup.
And Toddie, with an armed escort under the charge of Frank and Fred, went next day to visit the king's kraal. The view from the doorway was truly superb. All the rich and fertile island, with its flowering trees, with its orange groves and waving cocoa-nut and banana plantations, its woods and waters, its silvery shores and the bright blue sea itself, patched here and there with opal or green, lay down below at their feet; and up here, so high was the hill, a cool and delightful breeze was blowing.
"Oh," cried Toddie, "I think I should like to stay here for ever and ever!"
When Quambo translated this remark of Toddie's to the king, that potentate gallantly offered to club, cook, and eat his queen that Toddie might reign in her stead. And Toddie, the little witch, nodded smilingly to him, and assured him, through the interpreter, that she would "ask mamma."