CHAPTER XXII.
TANTALIZING, VERY.
They looked at one another again with a wild surmise.

The voice was as the voice of some long past age.

Could the parrot be speaking to them in the words of seventeenth-century English?
Even M.Peyron, who at first had received the strange discovery with incredulity, woke up before long to the importance of this sudden and unexpected revelation.

The Tu-Kila-Kila who had taught Methuselah that long poem or sermon, which native tradition regarded as containing the central secret of their creed or its mysteries, and which the cruel and cunning Tu-Kila-Kila of to-day believed to be of immense importance to his safety--that Tu-Kila-Kila of other days was, in all probability, no other than an English sailor.

Cast on these shores, perhaps, as they themselves had been, by the mercy of the waves, he had managed to master the language and religion of the savages among whom he found himself thrown; he had risen to be the representative of the cannibal god; and, during long months or years of tedious exile, he had beguiled his leisure by imparting to the unconscious ears of a bird the weird secret of his success, for the benefit of any others of his own race who might be similarly treated by fortune in future.