Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/107

 word a period, or even a long pause; and I cannot find a better comparison for the distance between his words than the silence which follows the “Amen” after a long prayer in church; which is, as every one knows, a signal of the proper time to cough or blow one’s nose. What he said was generally well considered, and if he could have persuaded himself to omit those untimely pauses, his sentences would have been, in a rhetorical point of view at least, passable, but all that crumbling, stuttering, and ruggedness, made listening to him very tedious. One often stumbled at it, for generally, if you commenced to reply, thinking the sentence finished, and the remainder left to your ingenuity, the remaining words came on as the stragglers of a defeated army, and made you think that you had interrupted him,—an idea which is always disagreeable. The public at Serang, such persons at least as were not in the service of the Government, called his conversation ‘slimy,’ but Government employés were more circumspect. I do not think this word very nice, but I must confess that it expressed very well the principal quality of the Resident’s eloquence. As yet I have said nothing of Max Havelaar and his wife,—for these were the two persons who had alighted from the carriage after the Resident, with their child and the ‘baboe;’ and perhaps it might be sufficient to leave the description of their appearance and character to the current of events and your proper imagination. But as I am now occupied with