"'I've been among the New Zealanders,' quoth Jack, 'and there they use each other for fresh grub, as regular as boiled duff in a man-of-war's mess. They used to eat their fathers and mothers, when they got too old to take care of themselves; but now they've got to be more civilised, and so they only eat rickety children, and slaves, and enemies taken in battle.'
"'A decided instance of the progress of improvement, and march of mind,' said I.
"'Well, I believe that is what the missionaries call it,' replied Jack; 'but it's a bad thing for the old folks. They don't take to the new fashion—they are in favour of the good old custom. I never see'd the thing myself; but Bill Brown, a messmate of mine once, told me that, when he was at the Bay of Islands, he see'd a great many poor old souls going about with tears in their eyes, trying to get somebody to eat them. One of them came off to the ship, and told them that he couldn't find rest in the stomachs of any of his kindred, and wanted to know if the crew wouldn't take him in. The skipper told him he was on monstrous short allowance, but he couldn't accommodate him. The poor old fellow, Bill said, looked as though his heart would break. There were plenty of sharks round the ship, and the skipper advised him to jump overboard; but he couldn't bear the idea of being eaten raw.'"
The great audacity of Dr Mayo's fictions preclude surprise at the boldness of his tropes and similes. The tails of his lions lash the ground "with a sound like the falling of clods upon a coffin;" their roar is like the boom of a thirty-two pounder, shaking the trees, and rattling the boulders in the bed of the river. Of course, allowance must be made for the vein of humorous rhodomontade peculiar to certain American writers, and into which Dr Mayo sometimes unconsciously glides, and, at others, voluntarily indulges. His description of the conjuring tricks of the Framazugdan jugglers comes under the latter head.
"Some of them were truly wonderful, as, for instance, turning a man into a tree bearing fruit, and with monkeys skipping about in the branches; and another case, where the chief juggler apparently swallowed five men, ten boys, and a jackass, threw them all up again, turned himself inside out, blew himself up like a balloon, and, exploding with a loud report, disappeared in a puff of luminous vapour. I could not but admire the skill with which the tricks were performed, although I was too much of a Yankee to be much astonished at anything in the Hey, Presto! line."
A countryman of Mr Jefferson Davis is not expected to feel surprise at anything in the way of sleight of hand, or "double shuffle;" and there was probably nothing more startling to the senses in the evaporation of King Shounsé's conjuror, than in the natural self-extinction of the Mississippian debt. It is only a pity that Jonathan Romer did not carry his smart fellow-citizen to the country of the Pholdefoos, a class of enthusiasts who devote their lives to a search for the germs of moral, religious, and political truth. Mr Davis would have felt rather out of his element at first, but could not have failed ultimately to have benefited by his sojourn amongst these singular savages.
On coming in sight of her father's capital, Kaloolah is overcome with emotion, and sinks weeping into her brother's arms. "I felt," says Jonathan, "that this was a situation in which even the most sympathising lover would be de trop. There were thronging associations which I could not share, vibrating memories to which my voice was not attuned, bonds of affection which all-powerful love might transcend, and even disrupt, but whose precise nature it could not assume. There are some lovers who are jealous of such things—fellows who like to wholly monopolise a woman, and who are constantly on the watch, seizing and appropriating her every look, thought, and feeling, with somewhat of the same notion of an exclusive right, as that with which they pocket a tooth-pick. I am not of that turn. The female heart is as curiously and as variously stocked as a country dry-goods store. A man may be perhaps allowed to select out, for his own exclusive use, some of the heavier articles, such as sheetings, shirtings, flannels, trace-chains, hobby-horses, and goose-yokes; but that is no reason why the neighbours should be at once cut off from their accustomed supply of small-wares."
We venture to calculate that it takes a full-blooded Yankee to write in this strain, which, reminds us, remotely, it is true, of some of Mr Samuel Slick's eccentric fancies. Dr Mayo has considerable versatility of pen; he dashes at everything, from the ultra-grotesque to the hyper-sentimental, from the wildest fable to the most substantial matter-of-fact; and if not particularly successful in some styles, in others he really makes what schoolboys call "a very good offer." But the taste of the day is by no means for extravaganza travels, after the fashion of Gulliver, but without the brilliant and searching satire that lurks in Lilliput and Laputa. Mr Herman Melville might have known that much; although we have heard say that certain keen critics have caught glimpses in his Mardi of a hidden meaning—one, however, which the most penetrating have hitherto been unable to unravel. We advise Dr Mayo to start afresh, with a better scheme. Instead of torturing his inventive faculties to produce rotatory dragons, wingless birds, (propelled through the air by valves in their heads,) and countries where courtiers, like Auriol in the ring at Franconi's, do public homage by standing on their hands; let him seek his inspiration in real life, as it exists in the wilder regions of the vast continent of which he is a native. A man who has strayed so far, and seen so much, can hardly be at a loss. The slaver's surgeon, the inmate of the Bedouin's tent, the bold explorer of the deadly swamps of Congo, had surely rambled nearer home before a restless fancy lured him to such distant and dangerous latitudes. Or are we too bold in assuming that the wilds and forests of Western America have echoed to the crack of his rifle, and that the West Indian seas have borne the furrow of his vessel's prow? It is in such scenes we would gladly find him, when next he risks himself in print: beneath the shade of the live oak or on the rolling prairie, or where the black flag, with the skeleton emblem, floats from the masthead. He has worked out his crotchet of an imaginary white nation in the heart of Africa, carrying it through with laborious minuteness, and with results hardly equal to the pains bestowed: let him now turn from the ideal to the real, and may our next meeting be on the Spanish main under rover's bunting, or west of the clearings, where the bison roams and the Redskin prowls, and the stragglers from civilisation have but begun to show themselves.