Island Nights' EntertainmentsStevenson, Robert Louis
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Island Nights' Entertainments
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Short stories
The streets in that part of the city were as clean as a ship’s decks,
and though it was noon, there were no passengers. Keawe set the bottle
in the gutter and walked away. Twice he looked back, and there was the
milky, round-bellied bottle where he left it. A third time he looked
back, and turned a corner; but he had scarce done so, when something
knocked upon his elbow, and behold! it was the long neck sticking up;
and as for the round belly, it was jammed into the pocket of his
pilot-coat.
“And that looks like the truth,” said Keawe.
The next thing he did was to buy a cork-screw in a shop, and go apart
into a secret place in the fields. And there he tried to draw the cork,
but as often as he put the screw in, out it came again, and the cork as
whole as ever.
“This is some new sort of cork,” said Keawe, and all at once he began
to shake and sweat, for he was afraid of that bottle.
On his way back to the port-side, he saw a shop where a man sold shells
and clubs from the wild islands, old heathen deities, old coined money,
pictures from China and Japan, and all manner of things that sailors
bring in their sea-chests. And here he had an idea. So he went in and
offered the bottle for a hundred dollars. The man of the shop laughed
at him at the first, and offered him five; but, indeed, it was a
curious bottle—such glass was never blown in any human glassworks, so
prettily the colours shone under the milky white, and so strangely the
shadow hovered in the midst; so, after he had disputed awhile after the
manner of his kind, the shop-man gave Keawe sixty silver dollars for
the thing, and set it on a shelf in the midst of his window.
“Now,” said Keawe, “I have sold that for sixty which I bought for
fifty—or, to say truth, a little less, because one of my dollars was
from Chili. Now I shall know the truth upon another point.”
So he went back on board his ship, and, when he opened his chest, there
was the bottle, and had come more quickly than himself. Now Keawe had a
mate on board whose name was Lopaka.
“What ails you?” said Lopaka, “that you stare in your chest?”
They were alone in the ship’s forecastle, and Keawe bound him to
secrecy, and told all.
“This is a very strange affair,” said Lopaka; “and I fear you will be
in trouble about this bottle. But there is one point very clear—that
you are sure of the trouble, and you had better have the profit in the
bargain. Make up your mind what you want with it; give the order, and
if it is done as you desire, I will buy the bottle myself; for I have
an idea of my own to get a schooner, and go trading through the
islands.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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