A DIRTY POTENTATE. broader, the cheek-bones higher, the nose flatter and more curved, the upper lip longer, the mouth wider, the eyes even smaller, contracting when he laughed into scarcely distinguishable slits. Upon his long upper lip grew a little hedge-row of black bristles, which did not curl gracefully nor droop languidly, but which stuck straight out like the whiskers of a cat. A few of the same sort radiated from his chin. I judged him to be about forty years old, and since soap and towels and the external application of water have not yet been introduced among the native inhabitants of Whale Sound, these forty years had favored the accumulation of a coating to the skin, which, by the unequal operation of friction, had given his hands and face quite a spotted appearance.
But if he was not handsome, he was not really ugly; for, despite his coarse features and dirty face, there was a rugged sort of good-humor and frank simplicity about the fellow which pleased me greatly. His tongue was not inclined to rest. He must tell me every thing. His wife was still living, and had added two girls to the amount of his responsibilities; but his face glowed with delight when I asked him about their first-born, whom I remembered in 1854 as a bright boy of some five or six summers, and he exhibited all of a father's just pride in the prospect of the lad's future greatness. Already he could catch birds, and was learning to drive dogs.
I asked him about his old rival Sipsu, who once gave me much trouble, and was an endless source of inconvenience to Kalutunah. He was dead. When asked how he died, he was a little loath to tell, but he finally said that he had been killed. He had become very unpopular, and was stabbed one night in a dark
