Her face was thin and small and was topped by an enormous mass of frizzled hair while her eyes set at a slight angle so that you couldn’t just tell whether she was looking at you to the leeward or a rubber tree to the windward. Although her eyes were thus slightly out of alignment and her mouth was cut on much too large a scale, which gave her a hard look, she was always smiling good naturedly. The first thing I knew Princess Mabel began to hang around me and to eat and drink out of my cocoa-nut shell. She was an artistic creation in olive drab, small, and lithe, but withal a very amiable and charming maiden as cannibal maidens go. She hadn’t been spoiled by working in high-toned families in Montclair yet. I fought shy of her for some time for I thought they wanted to put up a job on me and that the moment I gave her a pleasant look I’d be on my way to the stew pot; this belief was further fixed in my mind by occasionally finding a skull, a rib, ulna, fibula, and other parts of the human skeleton lying around loose. The rubber men, who could speak the Indian tongue a little, assured me, however, that the King had taken a great fancy to me--I suppose because I looked so young and tender--and that the Princess herself thought very well of me. The King’s idea, they informed me, was to have me marry the princess so as to improve the royal strain just as his own savage self had been improved in the slave days of South America when the niggers would run away from their masters and seek decent society among the cannibals. “For heaven’s sake, boy,” one of the rubber men said to me, “make up your mind to marry her or we’ll all be served up _a la_ chop suey in the grill room.” Henceforth I treated her with all the courtesy and dignity I could command and she reciprocated by showing me where her papa kept my pistol, my watch and my compass--things I was glad to know, and she gave me these stones too, which I am told by dealers in gems in Maiden Lane to be diamonds. How much are they worth? No one knows until I have them cut. Everything went fine for the next couple of months but I was getting pretty sick of the life and kept scheming to get away. This tribe of savages used powerful bows and arrows barbed with bone and tipped with feathers. It was all I could do to bend them but the King had one made for me that was more to my strength and I learned to use it with precision and great effect. Every day I would go hunting and I always had the company of a couple of pleasant secret service savages. Whatever I bagged I gave King Oopla and Princess Mabel the very choicest of it and I always tried to get game that was to their liking. We became great friends and I wouldn’t leave these good simple minded people--no not for anything in the world unless I got a good chance.