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to-day are many of them poor. One residual trait of savage incompetence I have already referred to; they cannot administer a trust--I was told there had never yet been a case known. Even a judge, skilled in the knowledge of the law and upright in its administration, was found insusceptible of those duties and distinctions which appear so natural and come so easy to the European. But the disability stands alone, a single survival in the midst of change; and the faults of the modern Hawaiian incline to the other side. My orator of Hookena court-room may be a gentleman much maligned; I may have received his character from the lips of his political opponents; but the type described is common. The islands begin to fill with lawyers; many of whom, justly or unjustly, are disbarred; and to the age of Kamehameha, the age of Glossin has succeeded. Thus none would rob the store of the Portuguese, but the law was wrested to oppress him.

It was of old a warlike and industrious race. They were diggers and builders; the isles are still full of their deserted monuments; the modern word for law, Kanawai, "water rights," still serves to remind us of their ancient irrigation. And the island story is compact of battles. Their courage and goodwill to labour seems now confined to the sea, where they are active sailors and fearless boatmen, pursue the shark in his own element, and make a pastime of their incomparable surf. On shore they flee equally from toil and peril, and are all turned to carpet occupations and to parlous frauds. Nahinu, an ex-judge, was paid but two dollars for a hard day in court, and he is paying a dollar a day to the labourers among his coffee. All Hawaiians envy and are ready to compete with him for this odd chance of an occasional fee for some hours' talking; he cannot find one to earn a certain hire under the sun in his plantation, and the work is all transacted by immigrant Chinese. One cannot but be reminded of the love of the French middle class for office work; but in Hawaii, it is the race in bulk that shrinks from manly occupation. During a late revolution, a lady found a powerful young Hawaiian crouching among the grass in her garden. "What are you doing here?" she cried, for she was a strong partisan. "Do you not know they are murdering your king?" "I know," said the skulker. "Why do you not go to help him?" she asked. "Aflaid," said the poor craven, and crouched again among the grass. Here was a strange grandchild for the warriors that followed or faced Kamehameha. I give the singular instance as the more explicit; but the whole race must have been stricken at the moment with a similar weakness. No man dare say of this revolution that it was unprovoked; but its means were treachery and violence; the numbers and position of those engaged made the design one of the most insolent in history; and a mere modicum of native boldness and cohesion must have brought it to the dust. "My race had one virtue, they were brave," said a typical Hawaiian: "and now they have taken that away."

I have named a French example: but the thought that haunts the stranger in Hawaii is that of Italy. The ruggedness of feature which marks out the race among Polynesians is the Italian ruggedness. Countenances of the same eloquent harshness, manners of the same vivacious cordiality, are to be found in Hawaii and amongst Italian fisher-folk or whose people, in the midst of life, retain more charm. I recall faces, both of men and women, with a certain leonine stamp, trusty, sagacious, brave, beautiful in plainness: faces that take the heart captive. The tougher struggle of the race in these hard isles has written history there; energy enlivens the Hawaiian strength--or did so once, and the faces are still eloquent of the lost possession. The stock that has produced a Caesar, a Kamehameha, a K?a-humanu, retains their signature.

A RIDE IN THE FOREST

As we mounted the glacis of the island, the horses clattering on the lava, we saw far above us the curtain of the rain exclude the view. The sky was clear, the sun strong overhead; around us, a thin growth of bushes and creepers glittered green in their black setting, like plants upon a ruinous pavement; all else was lava--wastes of lava, some of them enclosed with dry-stone walls. But the bushes, when the rain descends often enough from its residential altitudes, flourish extremely; and cattle and asses, walking on these resonant slabs, collect a livelihood. Here and there, a prickly-pear came to the bigness of a standard tree and made a space of shade; under one I saw a donkey--under another no less than three cows huddled from the sun. Thus we had before our eyes the rationale of two of the native distinctions; traversed the zone of flowering shrubs; and saw above us the mist hang perennial in Mau.

A little way beyond, we plunged into the forest. It grew at first very sparse and park-like, the trees of a pale verdure, but healthy, the parasites, per contra, often dead. Underfoot, the ground was still a rockery of fractured lava; but now the interstices were filled with soil. A sedge-like grass grew everywhere, and the horses munched it by the way with relish. Candle-nut trees with their white foliage stood in groves. Bread-fruits were here and there, but never well-to-do; Hawaii is no true mother for the bread-fruit or the cocoa-palm. Mangoes, on the other hand, attained a splendid bigness, many of them discoloured on one side with a purplish hue which struck the note of autumn. The same note was repeated by a certain aerial creeper, which drops from heaven like the wreck of an old kite, and roosts on tree-tops with a pendent raffle of air-roots, the whole of a colour like a wintry beech's. These are clannish plants; five or six may be quartered on a single tree, thirty or forty on a grove; the wood dies under them to skeletons; and they swing there, like things hung out from washing, over the death they have provoked.

We had now turned southward towards Kaa, following a shapeless bridle-track which is the high road of Hawaii. The sea was on one hand. Our way was across--the woods we threaded did but cling upon--the vast declivity of the island front. For long, as we still skirted the margin of the forest, we kept an open view of the whole falling seaboard, the white edge of surf now soundless to our ears, and the high blue sea marbled by tide rips, and showing under the clouds of an opalescent milky white. The height, the breeze, the giddy gradient of the isle, delighted me. I observed a spider plant its abhorred St. Andrew's cross against the sea and sky, certainly fifty yards from where I rode, and five feet at least from either tree: so wide was its death-gossamer spread, so huge the ugly vermin.

Presently the sea was lost, the forest swallowed us. Ferns joined their fronds above a horseman's head. High over these, the dead and the living rose and were hung with tattered parasites. The breeze no longer reached us; it was steaming hot; and the way went up and down so abruptly, that in one place my saddle-girth was burst and we must halt for repairs. In the midst of this rough wilderness, I was reminded of the aim of our excursion. The schoolmaster and certain others of Hookena had recently bought a tract of land for some four thousand dollars; set out coffee; and hired a Chinaman to mind it. The thing was notable in itself; natives selling land is a thing of daily custom; of natives buying, I have heard no other instance; and it was civil to show interest. "But when," I asked, "shall we come to your coffee plantation?" "This is it," said he, and pointed down. Their bushes grew on the path-side; our horses breasted them as they went by; and the gray wood on every hand enclosed and over-arched that thread of cultivation.

The breakneck path had descended almost to the sea, and we were already within sound of its reverberations, when a cliff hove up suddenly on the landward hand, very rugged and broken, streaked with white lichen, laddered with green lianas, and pierced with the apertures of half a hundred caves. Two of these were piously sealed with doors, the wood scarce weathered. For the Hawaiian remembers the repository of the bones of old, and is still jealous of the safety of ancestral relics. Nor without cause. For the white man comes and goes upon the hunt for curiosities; and one consults soothsayers and explores the caves of Kona after the fabled treasures of Kamehameha.

THE CITY OF REFUGE

Our way was northward on the naked lava of the coast. The schoolmaster led the march on a trumpeting black stallion; not without anxious thought, I followed after on a mare. The sun smote us fair and full; the air streamed from the hot rock, the distant landscape gleamed and trembled through its vortices. On the left, the coast heaved bodily upward to Mau, the zone of mists and forests, where it rains all day, and the clouds creep up and down, and the groves loom and vanish in the margin.

The land was still a crust of lava, here and there ramparted with cliffs, and which here and there breaks down and shows the mouths of branching galleries, mines and tombs of nature's making, endlessly vaulted, and ramified below our passage. Wherever a house is, cocoa-palms spring sheer out of the rock; a little shabby in this northern latitude, not visibly the worse for their inclement rooting. Hookena had shone out green under the black lip of the overhanging crag, green as a May orchard; the lava might have been some rich black loam. Everywhere, in the fissures of the rock, green herbs and flowering bushes prospered; donkeys and cattle were everywhere; everywhere, too, their whitened bones, telling of drought. No sound but of the sea pervades this region; and it smells strong of the open water and of aromatic plants.

We skirted one cliffy cove, full of bursting surges; and if it had not been for the palms, and the houses, and the canoes that were putting out to fish, and the colour of the cliffs and the bright dresses of the women that sat about the doors at work, I might have thought myself in Devonshire. A little further, we passed a garden enclosed in dry stone walls from the surrounding blackness; it seemed a wonder of fertility; hard by was the owner, a white man, waiting the turn of the tide by the margin of his well; so soon as the sea flowed, he might begin to irrigate with brackish water. The children hailed my companion from wayside houses. With one little maid, knotting her gown about her in embarrassment so as to define her little person like a suit of tights, we held a conversation more prolonged. "Will you be at school to-morrow?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like school?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like bathing?" "No, ma'am," with a staggering change of sex. Another maiden, of more tender growth and wholly naked, fled into the house at our approach, and appeared again with a corner of a towel. Leaning one hand on the post, and applying her raiment with the other, she stood in the door and watched us haughtily. The white flag of a surveyor and a pound-master's notice on a board told of the reign of law.

At length we turned the corner of a point and debouched on a flat of lava. On the landward hand, cliffs made a quadrant of an amphitheatre, melting on either side into the general mountain of the isle. Over these, rivers of living lava had once flowed, had frozen as they fell, and now depended like a sculptured drapery. Here and there the mouth of a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable's length beyond the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; the ruin, the Hale Keawe, temple and city of refuge.

When Ellis passed in 1823, six years before this intervention of the dead, the temple still preserved some shadow of its ancient credit and presented much of its original appearance. He has sketched it, rudely in a drawing, more effectively in words. "Several rudely carved male and female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some on low pedestals under the shade of an adjacent tree, others on high posts on the jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. A number stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual guardians of 'the mighty dead' reposing in the house adjoining.... Once they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most indigent nakedness.... The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed to support; distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness. We endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but were told it was strictly prohibited.... However, by pushing one of the boards across the doorway a little on one side, we looked in and saw many large images, with distended mouths, large rows of sharks' teeth, and pearl-shell eyes. We also saw several bundles, apparently of human bones, cleaned, carefully tied up with sinnet made of cocoa-nut fibre, and placed in different parts of the house, together with some rich shawls and other valuable articles, probably worn by those to whom the bones belonged." Thus the careless eyes of Ellis viewed and passed over the bones of sacrosanct Keawe, in his house which he had builded.

Cities of refuge are found not only in Hawaii but in the Gilberts: where their name is now invariably used for a mosquito-net. But the refuge of the Gilberts was only a house in a village, and only offered, like European churches, a sanctuary for the time. The hunted man might harbour there, and live on charity: woe to him if he stepped without. The City of Refuge of Honaunau possessed a larger efficacy. Its gate once passed, an appearance made before the priest on duty, a hasty prayer addressed to the chief idol, and the guilty man was free to go again, relieved from all the consequences of his crime or his misfortune. In time of war, its bulwarks were advertised by pennons of white tapa; and the aged, the children, and the poorer-hearted of the women of the district awaited there the issue of the battle. But the true wives followed their lords into the field, and shared with them their toil and danger.

The city had yet another function. There was in Hawaii a class apart, comparable to the doomed families of Tahiti, whose special mission was to supply the altar. It seems the victim fell usually on the holy day, of which there were four in the month; between these, the man was not only safe, but enjoyed, in virtue of his destiny, a singular licence of behaviour. His immunities exceeded those of the mediaeval priest and jester rolled in one; he might have donned the King's girdle , and gone abroad with it, unpunished and apparently unblamed; and with a little care and some acquaintance in priests' families, he might prolong this life of licence to old age. But the laws of human nature are implacable; their destiny of privilege and peril turned the men's heads; even at dangerous seasons, they went recklessly abroad upon their pleasures; were often sighted in the open, and must run for the City of Refuge with the priestly murderers at their heels. It is strange to think it was a priest also who stood in the door to welcome and protect them.

The enclosure of the sanctuary was all paved with the lava; scattered blocks encumbered it in places; everywhere tall cocoa-palms jutted from the fissures and drew shadows on the floor; a loud continuous sound of the near sea burthened the ear. These rude monumental ruins, and the thought of that life and faith of which they stood memorial, threw me in a muse. There are times and places where the past becomes more vivid than the present, and the memory dominates the ear and eye. I have found it so in the presence of the vestiges of Rome; I found it so again in the City of Refuge at Honaunau; and the strange, busy, and perilous existence of the old Hawaiian, the grinning idols of the Heiau, the priestly murderers and the fleeing victim, rose before and mastered my imagination.

Some dozen natives of Honaunau followed me about to show the boundaries; and I was recalled from these scattering thoughts by one of my guides laying his hand on a big block of lava.

"This stone is called Kaahumanu," said he. "It is here she lay hid with her dog from Kamehameha."

And he told me an anecdote which would not interest the reader as it interested me, till he has learned what manner of woman Kaahumanu was.

KAAHUMANU

Kamehameha the first, founder of the realm of the Eight Islands, was a man properly entitled to the style of great. All chiefs in Polynesia are tall and portly; and Kamehameha owed his life in the battle with the Puna fishers to the vigour of his body. He was skilled in single combat; as a general, he was almost invariably the victor. Yet it is not as a soldier that he remains fixed upon the memory; rather as a kindly and wise monarch, full of sense and shrewdness, like an old plain country farmer. When he had a mind to make a present of fish, he went to the fishing himself. When famine fell on the land, he remitted the tributes, cultivated a garden for his own support with his own hands, and set all his friends to do the like. Their patches of land, each still known by the name of its high-born gardener, were shown to Ellis on his tour. He passed laws against cutting down young sandal-wood trees, and against the killing of the bird from which the feather mantles of the archipelago were made. The yellow feathers were to be plucked, he directed, and the bird dismissed again to freedom. His people were astonished. "You are old," they argued; "soon you will die; what use will it be to you?" "Let the bird go," said the King. "It will be for my children afterwards." Alas, that his laws had not prevailed! Sandal-wood and yellow feathers are now things of yesterday in his dominions.

No time was lost. The very day of his death, May 8th, 1819, the women of the court ate of forbidden food, and some of the men sat down with them to meat. Infidelity must have been deep-seated in the circle of Kamehameha; for no portent followed this defiance of the gods, and none of the transgressors died. But the priests were doubtless informed of what was doing; the blame lay clearly on the shoulders of Kaahumanu, the most conspicuous person in the land, named by the dying Kamehameha for a conditional successor: "If Liholiho do amiss, let Kaahumanu take the kingdom and preserve it." The priests met in council of diviners; and by a natural retort, it was upon Kaahumanu that they laid the fault of the King's death. This conspiracy appears to have been quite in vain. Kaahumanu sat secure. On the day of the coronation, when the young King came forth from the heiau, clad in a red robe and crowned with his English diadem, it was almost as an equal that she met and spoke to him. " heaven, I name to you the possessions of your father; here are the chiefs, there are the people of your father; there are your guns, here is your land. But let you and me enjoy that land together." He must have known already she was a free-eater, and there is no doubt he trembled at the thought of that impiety and of its punishment; yet he consented to what seems her bold proposal. The same day he met his own mother, who signed to him privately that he should eat free. But Liholiho was incapable of so much daring: he hung long apart from the court circle with a clique of the more superstitious; and it was not till five months later, after a drinking bout in a canoe at sea, that he was decoyed to land by stronger spirits, and was seen to eat of a dog, drink rum, and smoke tobacco, with his servant women. Thus the food tabu fell finally at court. Ere it could be stamped out upon Hawaii, a war must be fought; wherein the chief of the old party fell in battle; his brave wife Manono by his side, mourned even by the missionary Ellis.

The fall of one tabu involved the fall of others; the land was plunged in dissolution; morals ceased. When the missionaries came , all the wisdom in the kingdom was prepared to embrace the succour of some new idea. Kaahumanu early ranged upon that side, perhaps at first upon a ground of politics. But gradually she fell more and more under the influence of the new teachers; loved them, served them; valorously defended them in dangers, which she shared; and put away at their command her second husband. To the end of a long life, she played an almost sovereign part, so that in the ephemerides of Hawaii, the progresses of Kaahumanu are chronicled along with the deaths and the accessions of kings. For two successive sovereigns and in troublous periods, she held the reins of regency with a fortitude that has not been called in question, with a loyalty beyond reproach; and at last, on 5th June 1832, this Duke of Wellington of a woman made the end of a saint, fifty-seven years after her marriage with the conqueror. The date of her birth, it seems, is lost; we may call her seventy.

After this heroine, the stone in the precinct of Honaunau had been named. Here is the reason, and the tale completes her portrait. Kamehameha was, of course, polygamous; the number of his wives rose at last to twenty-five; and out of these no less than two were the sisters of Kaahumanu. The favourite was of a jealous habit; and when it came to a sister for a rival, her jealousy overflowed. She fled by night, plunged in the sea, came swimming to Honaunau, entered the precinct by the sea-gate, and hid herself behind the stone. There she lay naked and refused food. The flight was discovered; as she had come swimming, none had seen her pass; the priests of the temple were bound, it seems, to silence; and Kona was filled with the messengers of the dismayed Kamehameha, vainly seeking the favourite. Now, Kaahumanu had a dog who was much attached to her, who had accompanied her in her long swim, and lay by her side behind the stone; and it chanced, as the messengers ran past the City of Refuge, that the dog began to bark. "Ah, there is the dog of Kaahumanu!" said the messengers, and returned and told the king she was at the Hale O Keawe. Thence Kamehameha fetched or sent for her, and the breach in their relations was restored.

THE LEPERS OF KONA

A step beyond Hookena, a wooden house with two doors stands isolated in a field of broken lava, like ploughed land. I had approached it on the night of my arrival, and found it black and silent; yet even then it had inmates. A man and a woman sat there captive, and the man had a knife, brought to him in secret by his family. Not long, perhaps, after I was by, the man, silencing by threats his fellow-prisoner, cut through the floor and escaped to the mountain. It was known he had a comrade there, hunted on the same account; and their friends kept them supplied with food and ammunition. Upon the mountains, in most islands of the group, similar outlaws rove in bands or dwell alone, unsightly hermits; and but the other day an officer was wounded while attempting an arrest. Some are desperate fellows; some mournful women--mothers and wives; some stripling girls. A day or two, for instance, after the man had escaped, the police got word of another old offender, made a forced march, and took the quarry sitting: this time with little peril to themselves. For the outlaw was a girl of nineteen, who had been two years under the rains in the high forest, with her mother for comrade and accomplice. How does their own poet sing?

In the land of distress My dwelling was on the mountain height, My talking companions were the birds, The decaying leaves of the Ki my clothing.

The scenes I am about to describe, moving as they were to witness, have thus an element of something weak and false. Sympathy may flow freely for the leper girl; it may flow for her mother with reserve; it must not betray us into a shadow of injustice for the government whose laws they had attempted to evade. That which is pathetic is not needfully wrong.

I walked in a bright sun, after a grateful rain, upon the shore beyond Hookena. The breeze was of heavenly freshness, the surf was jubilant in all the caves; it was a morning to put a man in thought of the antiquity, the health and cleanness of the earth. And behold! when I came abreast of the little pest-house on the lava, both the doors were open. In front, a circle of some half-a-dozen women and children sat conspicuous in the usual bright raiment; in their midst was a crouching and bowed figure, swathed in a black shawl and motionless; and as I drew more near, I was aware of a continuous and high-pitched drone of song. The figure in the midst was the leper girl; the song was the improvisation of the mother, pouring out her sorrow in the island way. "That was not singing," explained the schoolmaster's wife on my return, "that was crying." And she sketched for me the probable tenor of the lament: "O my daughter, O my child, now you are going away from me, now you are taken away from me at last," and so on without end.

The thought of the girl so early separated from her fellows--the look of her lying there covered from eyesight, like an untimely birth--perhaps more than all, the penetrating note of the lament--subdued my courage utterly. With the natural impulse, I began to seek some outlet for my pain. It occurred to me that, after two years in the woods, the family affairs might well have suffered, and in view of the transplantation, clothes, furniture, or money might be needful. I believe it was not done wisely, since it was gone about in ignorance; I dare say it flowed from a sentiment no more erect than that of Polynesians; I am sure there were many in England to whom my superfluity had proved more useful; but the next morning saw me at the pest-house, under convoy of the schoolmaster and the policeman.

The doors were again open. A fire was burning and a pot cooking on the lava, under the supervision of an old woman in a grass-green sacque. This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers sat in the midst of their visitors, even the children touching them freely; the elder chatting at intervals--the girl in the same black weed and bowed in the same attitude as yesterday. It was painfully plain she would conceal, if possible, her face. Perhaps she had been beautiful: certainly, poor soul, she had been vain--a gift of equal value. Some consultation followed; I was told that nothing was required for outfit, but a gift in money would be gratefully received; and this I was about to make in silence. The confounded expression of the schoolmaster reminded me of where I was. We stood up, accordingly, side by side before the lepers; I made the necessary speech, which the schoolmaster translated sentence by sentence; the money was handed over and received; and the two women each returned a dry "Mahalo," the girl not even then exhibiting her face.

Between nine and ten of the same morning, the schooner lay-to off Hookena and a whaleboat came ashore. The village clustered on the rocks for the farewell: a grief perhaps--a performance certainly. We miss in our modern life these operatic consolations of the past. The lepers came singly and unattended; the elder first; the girl a little after, tricked out in a red dress and with a fine red feather in her hat. In this bravery, it was the more affecting to see her move apart on the rocks and crouch in her accustomed attitude. But this time I had seen her face; it was scarce horribly affected, but had a haunting look of an unfinished wooden doll, at once expressionless and disproportioned; doubtless a sore spectacle in the mirror of youth. Next there appeared a woman of the middle life, of a swaggering gait, a gallant figure, and a bold, handsome face. She came, swinging her hat, rolling her eyes and shoulders, visibly working herself up; the crowd stirred and murmured on her passage; and I knew, without being told, this was the mother and protagonist. Close by the sea, in the midst of the spectators, she sat down, and raised immediately the notes of the lament. One after another of her friends approached her. To one after the other she reached out an arm, embraced them down, rocked awhile with them embraced, and passionately kissed them in the island fashion, with the pressed face. The leper girl at last, as at some signal, rose from her seat apart, drew near, was inarmed like the rest, and with a small knot held some while in a general clasp. Through all, the wail continued, rising into words and a sort of passionate declamatory recitation as each friend approached, sinking again, as the pair rocked together, into the tremolo drone. At length the scene was over; the performers rose; the lepers and the mother were helped in silence to their places; the whaleboat was urged between the reefs into a bursting surge, and swung next moment without on the smooth swell. Almost every countenance about me streamed with tears.

It was odd, but perhaps natural amongst a ceremonious, oratorical race, that the boat should have waited while a passenger publicly lamented on the beach. It was more odd still that the mother should have been the chief, rather the only, actor. She was leaving indeed; she hoped to be taken as a Kokua, or clean assistant, and thus accompany her daughter to the settlement; but she was far from sure; and it was highly possible she might return to Kona in a month. The lepers, on the other hand, took leave for ever. In so far as regarded their own isle and birthplace, and for their friends and families, it was their day of death.

The soldier from the war returns, The sailor from the main:

but not the sick from the gray island. Yet they went unheeded; and the chief part, and the whole stage and sympathy, was for their travelling companion.

At the time, I was too deeply moved to criticise; mere sympathy oppressed my spirit. It had always been a point with me to visit the station, if I could: on the rocks of Hookena the design was fixed. I had seen the departure of lepers for the place of exile; I must see their arrival, and that place itself.

FOOTNOTE:

PART IV

THE GILBERTS

BUTARITARI

The whole extent of the South Seas is desert of ships, more especially that part where we were now to sail. No post runs in these islands; communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go is one thing, where you shall be able to arrive another. It was my hope, for instance, to have reached the Carolines, and returned to the light of day by way of Manila and the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we were destined to re-appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of mountains. Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings upon unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins; I had learned to welcome shark' flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.

Populous and independent--warrens of men, ruled over with some rustic pomp--such was the first and still the recurring impression of these tiny lands. As we stood across the lagoon for the town of Butaritari, a stretch of the low shore was seen to be crowded with the brown roofs of houses; those of the palace and king's summer parlour glittered near one end conspicuously bright; the royal colours flew hard by on a tall flagstaff; in front, on an artificial islet, the gaol played the part of a martello. Even upon this first and distant view, the place had scarce the air of what it truly was, a village; rather of that which it was also, a petty metropolis, a city rustic and yet royal.

The lagoon is shoal. The tide being out, we waded for some quarter of a mile in tepid shallows, and stepped ashore at last into a flagrant stagnancy of sun and heat. The lee side of a line island after noon is indeed a breathless place; on the ocean beach the trade will be still blowing, boisterous and cool; out in the lagoon it will be blowing also, speeding the canoes; but the screen of bush completely intercepts it from the shore, and sleep and silence and companies of mosquitoes brood upon the towns.

We may thus be said to have taken Butaritari by surprise. A few inhabitants were still abroad in the north end, at which we landed. As we advanced, we were soon done with encounter, and seemed to explore a city of the dead. Only, between the posts of open houses, we could see the townsfolk stretched in the siesta, sometimes a family together veiled in a mosquito net, sometimes a single sleeper on a platform like a corpse on a bier.

The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to those of churches. Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they could scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when the toys are mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale. Many were open sheds; some took the form of roofed stages; others were walled and the walls pierced with little windows. A few were perched on piles in the lagoon; the rest stood at random on a green, through which the roadway made a ribbon of sand, or along the embankments of a sheet of water like a shallow dock. One and all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-tree wood and palm-tree leaf their materials; no nail had been driven, no hammer sounded, in their building, and they were held together by lashings of palm-tree sinnet.

In the midst of the thoroughfare, the church stands like an island, a lofty and dim house with rows of windows; a rich tracery of framing sustains the roof; and through the door at either end the street shows in a vista. The proportions of the place, in such surroundings, and built of such materials, appeared august; and we threaded the nave with a sentiment befitting visitors in a cathedral. Benches run along either side. In the midst, on a crazy dais, two chairs stand ready for the king and queen when they shall choose to worship; over their heads a hoop, apparently from a hogshead, depends by a strip of red cotton; and the hoop is dressed with streamers of the same material, red and white.

This was our first advertisement of the royal dignity, and presently we stood before its seat and centre. The palace is built of imported wood upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron, the yard enclosed with walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of lych-house. It cannot be called spacious; a labourer in the States is sometimes more commodiously lodged; but when we had the chance to see it within, we found it was enriched with coloured advertisements and cuts from the illustrated papers. Even before the gate some of the treasures of the crown stand public: a bell of a good magnitude, two pieces of cannon, and a single shell. The bell cannot be rung nor the guns fired; they are curiosities, proofs of wealth, a part of the parade of the royalty, and stand to be admired like statues in a square. A straight gut of water like a canal runs almost to the palace door; the containing quay-walls excellently built of coral; over against the mouth, by what seems an effect of landscape art, the martello-like islet of the gaol breaks the lagoon. Vassal chiefs with tribute, neighbour monarchs come a-roving, might here sail in, view with surprise these extensive public works, and be awed by these mouths of silent cannon. It was impossible to see the place and not to fancy it designed for pageantry. But the elaborate theatre then stood empty; the royal house deserted, its doors and windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town immersed in silence. On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed stage, an ancient gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant; and beyond on the lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the sole thing moving.

The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a parapet. At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands into an oblong peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and summer parlour of the king. The midst is occupied by an open house or permanent marquee--called here a maniapa, or, as the word is now pronounced, a maniap'--at the lowest estimation forty feet by sixty. The iron roof, lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a woman must stoop to enter, is supported externally on pillars of coral, within by a frame of wood. The floor is of broken coral, divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the house far enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.

It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when we had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright shed, we were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful people, some twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of Butaritari. The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled. Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved upon examination to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon some mats, lolled Teburcimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and cruel, his body overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous and dull; he seemed at once oppressed with drowsiness and held awake by apprehension: a pepper rajah muddled with opium, and listening for the march of the Dutch army, looks perhaps not otherwise. We were to grow better acquainted, and first and last I had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet always to hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is no doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs.

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