'How much you got?I take him all,'replied his majesty,and became the lord of seventeen boxes at two dollars a cake.Or again,the merchant feigns the article is not for sale,is private property,an heirloom or a gift;and the trick infallibly succeeds.
Thwart the king and you hold him.His autocratic nature rears at the affront of opposition.He accepts it for a challenge;sets his teeth like a hunter going at a fence;and with no mark of emotion,scarce even of interest,stolidly piles up the price.Thus,for our sins,he took a fancy to my wife's dressing-bag,a thing entirely useless to the man,and sadly battered by years of service.Early one forenoon he came to our house,sat down,and abruptly offered to purchase it.I told him I sold nothing,and the bag at any rate was a present from a friend;but he was acquainted with these pretexts from of old,and knew what they were worth and how to meet them.Adopting what I believe is called 'the object method,'he drew out a bag of English gold,sovereigns and half-sovereigns,and began to lay them one by one in silence on the table;at each fresh piece reading our faces with a look.In vain I continued to protest I was no trader;he deigned not to reply.
There must have been twenty pounds on the table,he was still going on,and irritation had begun to mingle with our embarrassment,when a happy idea came to our delivery.Since his majesty thought so much of the bag,we said,we must beg him to accept it as a present.It was the most surprising turn in Tembinok's experience.
He perceived too late that his persistence was unmannerly;hung his head a while in silence;then,lifting up a sheepish countenance,'I 'shamed,'said the tyrant.It was the first and the last time we heard him own to a flaw in his behaviour.Half an hour after he sent us a camphor-wood chest worth only a few dollars -but then heaven knows what Tembinok'had paid for it.