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First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze.

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime -- to see what was next to follow.

The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fireplace made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.

For now the savage goes up to the empty fireplace, and removing the papered fireboard, sets up this little hunchbacked image, like a tenpin, between the andirons.

But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be.

Remember the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner.

Going to his heavy grego,* or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days' old Congo baby. *Jacket.

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen.

He might take a fancy to mine -- heavens! look at that tomahawk!

A pedlar of heads too -- perhaps the heads of his own brothers.

I quaked to think of it.

It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country.

Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.

As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms.

In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.

Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.

I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was the second floor back.

Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.