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128 Evidently the giant was not a witling. His answers were apt. After a moment's reflection I concluded it was worth the effort to make an appeal to his better nature—his over-soul.

"Don't you know that it is wrong to eat your fellow-beings?" I asked, with a happy mingling of austere reproach and sympathetic pain.

"Do you mean to come out soon?" asked the giant, seating himself upon an adjacent cliff, after tearing off such of the taller and stiffer trees as were in his way.

"It depends somewhat upon whether you remain where you are," I answered.

"Oh, I shall stay," said the giant, pleasantly. "Game is rare, and I have n't eaten a white man for two weeks."

This remark brought me back to my appeal to his higher being. "Then I shall remain here, too, for the present," I answered, "though I should like to get away before sunset. It's likely to be humid here after the sun sets. But, to return to my question, have you never thought that it was immoral and selfish to eat your fellow-creatures?" "Why, certainly," said the giant, with a hearty frankness that was truly refreshing. "That is why," he went on, "I asked you whether you were coming out soon. If not, I would be glad to while the time away by explaining to you exactly how I feel about these matters. Of course I could smoke you out" (here he showed me an enormous boulder of flint and a long steel rod, the latter evidently a bit of machinery from some wrecked ocean-steamer), "but I make it a rule seldom to eat a fellow-mortal until he is fully convinced that, all things considered, I am justified in so doing."

The reference to the smoking-out process had convinced me that this was no hulking ignoramus of a giant, and for a moment I began to fear that my Rutabaga Tremendosa was lost to the world forever. But the latter part of his speech reassured me.