"Oh, I should say it was reasonable enough from the Liverpool point of view." "Bah! There's not much of the Coast about you." He tore the letters into shreds, and folded these carefully into pipe-lights. "Dear old Godfrey trusted me up to the hilt, and this new fellow's got to learn to do the same, or I shall resign my commission. If he understood anything about running the office, he might know I should do all the work that was good for me." "I'm sure you do," said Carter civilly. "I'm afraid I'm the slacker. You let me have such an easy time of it whilst my arm was getting well, that I've slid off into lazy ways. I must buck up, and if you'll load the work onto me, Mr. Smith, you'll find I can do a lot more." Swizzle-Stick Smith dried the perspiration from his eye socket, fixed his glass into a firmer hold, and stared. "Well," he said at last, "you _are_ a d--d fool." And there the talk ended. It was that same day that Carter had his first introduction to Royalty. He was in the retail store--"feteesh," they call it on the Coast--weighing out baskets of palm kernels, measuring calabashes of orange-colored palm oil, judging as best he could the amount of adulterants the simple negro had added to increase the bulk, and apportioning the value in cotton cloth, powder, flintlock guns at twelve and six-pence apiece, and green cubical boxes of Holland gin. Trade proceeded slowly. The interior of the feteesh was a stew of heat and odors, and the white man's elaborate calculations were none of the most glib. To knock some idea of the fairness of these into the black man's skull was a work that required not only eloquence, but also athletic power. The simple savage who did only one day's shopping per annum was willing always to let the delights of it linger out as long as possible, and all the white man's hustling could not drive the business along at more than a snail's pace. By Coast custom, work for Europeans starts in those cool hours that know the daybreak, and switches off between eleven and twelve for breakfast; and thereafter siesta is the rule till the sun once more begins to throw a shadow. But on this particular day, when Swizzle-Stick Smith had knocked out his pipe and turned in under his mosquito bar, Carter sluiced a parrafin-can full of water over his red head by way of a final refreshment, and went down once more from the living rooms of the factory to the heat and the odors of the feteesh below. The sweating customers saw him come and roused up out of the purple shadows, and presently the game of haggle was once more in full swing.