‘I think your life would make a capital book,’ said Antonia, ‘and you could afford to leave the stories out.’
‘Ha! well, I don’t know; some people might object; but I have seen some queer places and people, and had some very narrow squeaks. I was a ship boy in the Lloyd when the Maoris took her at the Bay of Islands.’
‘What did they do?’ asked Ernest.
‘Do? Only murdered every living soul except a little girl and myself! Old Parson Ramsden came down months after and ransomed us. He could go anywhere. That little girl is a grandmother now. I could show you such a splendid bit of tattooing just—Antonia, my dear, you needn’t be afraid.’
‘Don’t be foolish, papa,’ said Antonia, blushing. ‘Mr. Neuchamp, he is only joking.’
‘Joking,’ said the old man; ‘if you’d only had those patterns printed out slowly and indelibly, like me and Mrs. Lutton, poor thing, you’d have known it was no joke.’
‘Well, they didn’t eat you that time, at any rate,’ said Ernest, coming to the rescue; ‘a hero can’t be killed in the first volume; and what was the next narrow escape?’
‘Years afterwards I was cast away in the south seas, and came ashore on a spar at an island where they’d never heard of a white man. They had sacrifices and prayers and made a kind of lottery about whether they should eat me; when, as luck would have it, the chief had lost his eldest son a year before, and the priests said I was him come back. So I was turned into a Kanaka Prince of Wales.’
‘And was the rank properly kept up?’
‘Jolliest place I ever was in, before or since; I had been starved and shipwrecked, and I tell you it was a pleasant change; I was the second man in the island. I had a palace, partly leaves, but cool and pleasant. I had thirty—well—hum—ha—more attendants than I knew what to do with. I cried, I know, when a Yankee whaler took me off six months after. But come, this won’t do, Master Ernest, you mustn’t keep me spinning sea-yarns all night about myself. You haven’t half told us about your doings. Was Captain Jinks really a pleasant sort of fellow? And how about the lock-up?’