This Conclusion, However, Was Not Altogether Satisfactory.
To oblige him, we at last took a sip of his "arva tee," and found it
very crude, and strong as Lucifer.
Curious to know whence it was
obtained, we questioned him; when, lighting up with pleasure, he
seized the taper, and led us outside the hut, bidding us follow.
After going some distance through the woods, we came to a dismantled
old shed of boughs, apparently abandoned to decay. Underneath,
nothing was to be seen but heaps of decaying leaves and an immense,
clumsy jar, wide-mouthed, and by some means, rudely hollowed out from
a ponderous stone.
Here, for a while, we were left to ourselves; the old man placing the
light in the jar, and then disappearing. He returned, carrying a
long, large bamboo, and a crotched stick. Throwing these down, he
poked under a pile of rubbish, and brought out a rough block of wood,
pierced through and through with a hole, which was immediately
clapped on the top of the jar. Then planting the crotched stick
upright about two yards distant, and making it sustain one end of the
bamboo, he inserted the other end of the latter into the hole in the
block: concluding these arrangements by placing an old calabash under
the farther end of the bamboo.
Coming up to us now with a sly, significant look, and pointing
admiringly at his apparatus, he exclaimed, "Ah, karhowree, ena
hannahanna arva tee!" as much as to say, "This, you see, is the way
it's done."
His contrivance was nothing less than a native still, where he
manufactured his island "poteen." The disarray in which we found it
was probably intentional, as a security against detection.
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