The Novels and Stories of Frank R. Stockton (Volume 19) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL IT was the most beautiful time of the year in the island of Maflana; the waters of the encircling Pacific were warm, but the breezes which came from the neighboring islet of Pruga were cool and odorous with the fragrance from many an aromatic tree and shrub. There were no inhabitants on the islet of Pruga, for its coral reefs did not offer inducements to visiting craft, and it seemed to exist solely for the purpose of furnishing fragrance to the island of Ma- fiana, where the winds blew from the northwest. The governor-general of the colony, Sefior Gon- zales Proventura y Torado, sat upon the front veranda of his official residence, on the plaza of Hula, the capital city of the colony. The governor was smoking sadly; the fumes from his rapid succession of cigarettes mingled with the odors floating over the sea from Pruga, but his senses were not gratified, nor was his soul comforted. Before him, on a little wooden perch, there stood a parrot, brilliant in yellow and red. It was motionless; it was dead; it was stuffed. Five weeks before that day he had shot it, and it had just been brought home by a native taxidermist. It was the last parrot he had shot, and his soul grew heavier as he gazed upon it. Sefior Proventura was a collector of parrots. In earlier days, in other spheres of colonial duties, he had been a collector of monkeys; but now he devoted his powers of marksmanship entirely to the bagging of the brilliantly colored parrots which were found in the island over which he exercised colonial authority. He was not only a sportsman: . he was a man of scientific proclivities; and he had invented a new chromatic scale in which all the desired combinations of color were furnished by the plumage of parrots. Many of these birds were arranged in order...