Then you could take a stool in front of Paradies's general store, and almost at any time engage the local teacher in an argument. You would expect, of course, that he would wander from his topic till you found yourself discussing something entirely foreign to the subject, but so long as he was talking, everything was satisfactory. There were the two Greek traders who had "poisoned the wells" out Lobuc way,--so people said. And I must not forget "Jac-cook," whose grandfather, according to his own report, had been a cannibal, a king of cannibals, and eaten a roast baby every morning for his breakfast. Jack was a soldier of fortune if there ever was one. He could give you a recipe for making _poi_ from ripe bananas and the milk of cocoanuts, or for distilling whisky from fermented oranges,--both of which formulas I have unfortunately lost. He recommended an exclusive diet of raw fish, and in his youth he had had many a hard battle with the shark and octopus. His one regret was that there were no sharks in the Oroquieta Bay, that, diving under, he could rip with a sharp knife. "To catch the devil-fish," he used to say, "you whirl them rapidly around your arm until they get all tangled up and supine-like." And once, like Ursus, in "Quo Vadis," he had taken a young bull by the horns and broken its neck. All members of good standing in the colony received their invitations to the birthday party. Old Vivan, the ex-horse-doctor of the _Insurrectos_, went out early in the morning to cut palms. The floor was waxed and the walls banked with green. The first to arrive was "Fresno Bill," the Cottobato trader, in a borrowed white suit and a pair of soiled shoes. Then came the bronzed Norwegian captain of the _Delapaon_, hearty and hale from twenty years of deep-sea sailing from the Java coast to Heligoland. Came Paradies, the little German trader, in his finest blacks, and chose a seat off in one corner of the room. Then "Foxy Grandpa" and the "Arizona Babe" arrived, and the old maid from Zamboanga, who, when expression failed her, would usurp the conversation with a "blab, blab, blab!" And as the serpent made for old Laocoön, so she now made for "Fresno Bill."