The Imp and the Author
conditionally refused—he said he would rather tip them when he left.
These things the Imp recalled as he watched him. A strange man, doubtless, but Uncle Stanley said that great authors felt obliged to be strange: the public expected it.
The Imp sat down across the pool from the Author and rested from his walk. A pleasant melancholy stole over him as he fancied their search for him—lunch must be well over by now. After a little he quietly launched the boat, for the Author was so still that he made no difference to speak of, and played peacefully. From an inner pocket he produced a little box with an elastic band about it. Having dug a pit in the sand, he reversed the open box, and a hot, tangled mass of hard-shelled, middle-sized insects tumbled out into the hole. They were on the order of potato-bugs, but larger, and the Imp, selecting with great discrimination the biggest, proceeded to place them on the deck and in the rigging of the ship. They did not like the water, so they stayed there, climbing slowly up and down the masts and scuttling busily about the deck in a most lifelike and pleasing manner.
56
