Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/209

 even though the occasion for it were just as serious as in those days just come here, Max—no, do not catch that insect—come here! Listen to me, you must never catch butterflies. That poor little thing has first crawled about quite a long time on a tree as a caterpillar; that wasn’t at all a jolly life! Now it has just got wings, and wants to fly about a little in the air, and enjoy itself, and look for food in the flowers, and it harms no one look, isn’t it much nicer to see it flutter about like this?”

And so the conversation passed from duels to butterflies, then to the mercy of the just man towards his beasts, to the teasing and torturing of animals, to the loi Grammont, to the National Assembly that passed this law, to the Republic, and goodness knows what else!

At last Havelaar rose. He excused himself to his guests, as he had business to attend to. When the next day the Controller called at his office, that officer was not aware that the new Assistant-Resident, after the conversation in the front veranda on the previous day, had ridden out to Parang-Koodyang—the district of the “outrageous abuses”—and had only returned thence early that morning.

I would ask the reader to believe that Havelaar was too well-mannered to talk so much at his own table as I have made it appear in the last chapters, as though he had monopolized the conversation with a complete neglect of his duties as a host, which surely prescribed that he should leave or afford his guests the opportunity of “coming forward.” I have taken a couple of haphazard instances, from the mass of material before me, and might have continued the table-talks a great deal longer, with less difficulty than it gave me to cut them short. I trust, however, that what has been described will be sufficient to justify to some extent the outline I gave earlier of Havelaar’s nature and qualities, and that the reader will follow, not without some sympathetic interest, the adventures that awaited him and his at Rangkas-Betoong.

The small family lived quietly. Havelaar was often out in the