We walked through the blazing sun of the tropic afternoon, down the palm-shaded main street of Avarua town, to the great grassy enclosure that surrounds the palace of the queen. One enters through a neat white gate; inside are one or two small houses, a number of palms and flowering bushes, and at the far end, a stately two-storeyed building constructed of whitewashed concrete, with big railed-in verandahs, and handsome arched windows. This is Makea’s palace, but her visitors do not go there to look for her. In true South Sea Islander fashion, she keeps a house for show and one for use. The islander, though he aspires when “civilised,” to own a big concrete house, “all same papalangi” (white man), does not really like living in a building that shuts out the air. He discovered the fresh-air system long before it was thought of by the folk who discovered him, and his own houses are always made of small poles or saplings, set without any filling, so that the whole building is as airy as a birdcage, and almost as transparent. In this he lives, while the big concrete house, with its Auckland made tables, chairs, and beds, and the red and blue table-cloths, and horrible gilt lamps fringed with cut glass lustres, and shrieking oleograph of King Edward in his coronation robes, is kept strictly for show, and perhaps for an occasional festival, such as a wedding party. It is an odd custom, but sensible, on the whole.

Makea’s favourite house is a pretty little reed and thatch villa several miles out in the country. When she is in town, she makes some concession to state by living in a small one-storeyed cottage, with a thatch and a verandah, and not much else, close beside her big palace. We found her at the cottage when we called, sitting on the verandah upon an ironwood couch, and petting a little turtle of which she is very fond. It seems a curious sort of creature to adore, but an elderly lady must have her little pet of some kind. In other climes, it is a pug, a parrot, or a cat. Here, the little turtle is considered chic, so the queen has one, the turtle having been always considered a perquisite of royalty in the old days, when the chiefs had the best of everything, even down to the choicest tit-bits of the roasted enemy, while the commonalty had to put up with what they could get.

I was introduced to the queen, who shook hands politely, and sent one of her handmaids for chairs. These being brought, my hostess and I sat down, and the latter conversed with Makea in Raratongan, translating a few conventional politenesses from myself, and conveying others to me in return. The queen wanted to know how I liked the island, if I had really come all the way from England, as she had heard, whether I was not afraid to travel so far alone, how long I hoped to stay, and so forth. All the time, as we talked, her keen black eyes were scanning me silently, rapidly, comprehensively, and making their own judgment, quite independently of the conversation and its inevitable formalities. And I, on my side, was gazing, I fear with some rudeness, at the very remarkable figure before me.

Makea, since the death of her husband, Prince Ngamaru, a few years ago, has laid aside all vanities of dress, and wears only the simplest of black robes, made loose and flowing from the neck in island fashion. She is supposed to be at least seventy years of age, and she is extremely stout, even for her height, which is well over six feet. Yet a more impressive figure than this aged, deposed, uncrowned sovereign, in her robe of shabby black, I have never seen. Wisdom, kindliness, and dignity are written large on her fine old face, which has more than a touch of resemblance to the late Queen Victoria. And oh, the shrewdness, the ability, the keen judgment of men and things, that look out from those brown, deep-set eyes, handsome enough, even in old age, to hint at the queen-like beauty that once belonged to this island queen!

Makea was always known as a wise, just, and very powerful sovereign. She ruled over the whole Cook group, and her word was law everywhere, even to the Prince Consort, the warlike Ngamaru, who to the very last retained some traces of his heathen upbringing, and used to be seen, in the island councils of only a few years ago, making the horrible cannibal gesture which signifies in unmistakable pantomime, “I will tear the meat from your bones with my teeth!” at any other council member who presumed to disagree with him. Their married life was a happy one, in spite of the prince’s violent character, and when he died, the widowed queen took all her splendid robes of velvet, silk, and satin, gorgeously trimmed with gold, tore them in fragments, and cast them into his grave, so that he might he soft, as befitted the prince who had been loved so well by such a queen.

Makea holds much of the real power in her hands to-day, for all that the islands are the property of the British Crown, and administered by a Commissioner. The Raratongan is submissive to chiefs by nature, and the queen, though uncrowned, is still reverenced and feared almost, as much as of old. It is firmly believed that she possesses the mystic power known as “mana” among the Maori races, and this, as it gives the owner power to slay at will, is greatly feared. The word is almost untranslatable, meaning, perhaps, something like “prestige,” “kudos,” or the old English “glamour.” It includes, among other gifts, second sight to a certain extent, the power to bring good or evil luck, and the ability already mentioned to deal death at will.

This last may sound like fiction. It is nothing of the sort, it is plain, bald fact, as any one who has ever lived in the islands can testify. There is nothing more commonly known in the South Seas than the weird power possessed by kings and heroes to slay with a word, and instances of its exercise could be found in every group.

Makea does not use it now, so they say. She is old: like aged folks in other places, she wants to “make her soul,” and it can readily be imagined that the mission authorities do not approve of such heathen proceedings. Still, there is not a native in Raratonga who does not believe that she could strike him dead with a wish, any day in the week, if she chose: and there are not a few who can tell you that in the days long ago, she exercised the power.

“Makea, she never rude, because she great chief,” said a relation of the royal family to me one day. “She never say to any one, ‘You go die!’ I think. She only saying, some time, ‘I wish I never seeing you again!’ and then the people he go away, very sorry, and by-n’-by he die—some day, some week, I don’ know—but he dyin’ all right, very quick, you bet!”

The power to die at will seems to be a heritage of the island races, though the power to live, when a chief bids them set sail on the dark seas of the unknown, is not theirs. Suicide, carried out without the aid of weapons or poisons of any kind, is not at all uncommon. A man or woman who is tired of life, or bitterly offended with any one, will often lie down on the mats, turn his face, like David of old; to the wall, and simply flicker out like a torch extinguished by the wind. There was once a white schooner captain, who had quarrelled with his native crew; and the crew, to pay him out, lay down and declared they would die to spite him.... But this is about Makea the Queen, not about the godless brutal captain, and the measures he took to prevent his men from taking passage in a body across the Styx. They didn’t go after all, and they were sore and sorry men when they made the island port, and the captain, who was a very ill-educated person, boasted far and wide for many a day after that, that he would exceedingly well learn any exceedingly objectionable nigger who offered to go and die on him again—and that is all that I must say about it, for more reasons than one.

The queen, after a little conversation, punctuated by intervals of fanning and smiling (and a more charming smile than Makea’s, you might search the whole South Seas to find), sent a girl up a tree for cocoanuts, and offered us the inevitable cocoanut water and bananas, without which no island call is complete. Afterwards, when we rose to go, she sent a handmaid with us to take us over the palace, of which she is, naturally, very proud, though she never enters it except on the rare occasion of some great festival.

The palace proved to be as uninteresting as the queen herself was interesting and attractive. It had a stuffy, shut-up smell, and it was furnished in the worst of European taste, with crude ugly sofas and chairs, tables covered with cheap-jack Manchester trinkets, and staring mirrors and pictures—partly sacred art, of a kind remarkably well calculated to promote the cause of heathenism, and partly portraits, nearly as bad as those one sees in the spring exhibitions at home. There were two or three saloons or drawing-rooms, all much alike, on the lower storey. Upstairs (it is only a very palatial island house that owns an upstairs) there were several bedrooms, furnished with large costly bedsteads of mahogany and other handsome woods, and big massive wardrobes and tables—all unused, and likely to remain so. The place was depressing on the whole, and I was glad to get out of it into the cheerful sun, although the heat at this hour of the afternoon was really outrageous.

[[Illustration: 0165]

Another afternoon, I drove out to see Queen Tinomana, a potentate only second to Makea in influence. Tinomana, like Makea, is a dynastic name, and is always borne by the high chief, man or woman, who is hereditary sovereign of a certain district. The present holder of the title is a woman, and therefore queen.

What a drive it was! The roadway round the island is celebrated all over the Pacific, and with justice, for nothing more lovely than this twenty-mile ribbon of tropic splendour is to be found beneath the Southern Cross. One drives in a buggy of colonial pattern, light, easy-running, and fast, and the rough little island horse makes short work of the miles of dazzling white sandy road that circle the shores of the bright lagoon. On one side rises the forest, green and rich and gorgeous beyond all that the dwellers of the dark North could possibly imagine, and opening now and then to display picture after picture, in a long gallery of magnificent mountain views—mountains blue as the sea, mountains purple as amethyst, mountains sharp like spear-heads, towered and buttressed like grand cathedrals, scarped into grey precipices where a bat could scarcely cling, and cloven into green gorges bright with falling streams. On the other, the palms and thick undergrowth hardly veil the vivid gleam of the emerald lagoon lying within the white-toothed barrier reef, where all day long the surf of the great Pacific creams and froths and pours. By the verge of the coral beach that burns like white fire in the merciless sun, the exquisite ironwood tree trails its delicate tresses above the sand, so that, if you leave the carriage to follow on the road, and walk down by the beach, you shall catch the green glow of the water, and the pearly sparkle of the reef, through a drooping veil of leafage fine as a mermaid’s hair. Sometimes the buggy runs for a mile or two through thick woods of this lovely tree, where the road is carpeted thickly with the fallen needles of foliage, so that the wheels run without sound, and you may catch the Eolian harp-song of the leaves, sighing ceaselessly and sadly

Of old, unhappy, far-off things,

when the evening wind gets up and the sun drops low on the lagoon.

The myths of the Pacific are marvellous in their way, but they pass over unnoticed much that could not have escaped the net of folk-lore and poetry in Northern lands. That the lovely ironwood, a tree with leaves like mermaid’s locks, and the voice of a mermaid’s song in its whispering boughs, should stand bare of legend or romance on the shores of a sea that is itself the very home of wonder, strikes the Northern mind with a sense of strange incongruity. But the soul of the islands is not the soul of the continents, and the poet of the Pacific is still to be born.

Sometimes, again, the little buggy rattles over white coral sand and gravel, on a stretch of road that is fairly buried in the forest. The sun is cut off overhead, and only a soft green glow sifts through. The palm-tree stems sweep upward, tall and white, the gigantic “maupei” rears aloft its hollow buttressed stems, carved out into caverns that would delight the soul of a modern Crusoe, and drops big chestnuts, floury and sweet, upon the road as we pass. The “utu,” or Barringtonia Speciosa, one of the most beautiful of island trees, towers a hundred feet into the warm glow above, its brilliant varnished leaves, nearly a foot long, and its strange rose and white flowers, shaped like feather-dusters, marking it out unmistakably from the general tangle of interlacing boughs, and crowding trunks and long liana ropes, green and brown, that run from tree to tree. If you were lost in the bush, and thirsty, one of those lianas would provide you with waters, were you learned enough in wood lore to slash it with your knife, and let the pure refreshing juice trickle forth. You might gather wild fruit of many kinds, too, and wild roots, mealy and nourishing, or dainty and sweet. And at night, you might creep into your hollow tree, or lie down on the warm sand of the shore, with nothing worse to fear than a mosquito or two.

There are no wild beasts in any of the Pacific Islands, save an occasional boar, which always lives remote from men in the hills, and is much readier to run away than to annoy. There are no poisonous snakes, either, tarantulas, or deadly centipedes and scorpions. I cannot honestly say that the two latter creatures do not exist, but they very seldom bite or sting any one who does not go barefooted, and their venom is not deadly, though painful.

On almost every tree, as we rattle along through the forest, my hostess and I can see the beautiful bird’s-nest fern, looking like a hanging basket of greenery. We have not time to stop to-day, but we shall have to go out some other afternoon and cut down a few of the smaller ones for table decoration, for there is a dinner party coming off, and we are short of pot plants for the rooms. Young palms, most graceful of all green things, shoot up like little fountains in the clearings, some of the smaller ones still’ root-bound by the large brown nut from which they have sprung. One would never think these dainty ball-room palms were related in any way to the stately white columns-spiring high above them, for the full-grown palm is all stem and scarcely any top, in comparison, while the young palm, a mass of magnificent spreading fronds, rises from a short bulb-like trunk that suggests nothing less than further growth.

The drive is six good miles, but it seems only too short. In a very little while, we have reached Queen Tinomana’s village—a picturesque little grassy town, with brown thatched huts, and white concrete cottages washed with coral lime, and gay red and yellow leaved ti trees standing before almost every door—and the queen’s own palace, a handsome two-storeyed house, quite as fine as Makea’s, stands up in front of us.

Passing by this piece of European splendour, we go to draw a more likely covert, and ere long flush our quarry in a little creeper-wreathed cottage, hidden behind bushes of deliciously scented frangipani and blazing red hibiscus. The queen is on the verandah, seated, like Makea, on an ironwood sofa of state. She sits here most of the day, having very little in the way of government to do, and no desire to trouble her amiable head with the white woman’s laborious methods of killing time. Sometimes she plaits a hat to amuse herself, being accomplished in this favourite Raratongan art—a sailor hat with a hard crown and stiff brim, and a good deal of neat but lacy fancy work in the twisting of the plait. Sometimes she receives friends, and hears gossip. Sometimes, she sleeps on the sofa, and wakes up to suck oranges and fall asleep again. The strenuous life is not the life beloved of Tinomana, nor (one may hint in the smallest of whispers) would her much more strenuous sister queen encourage any developments in that direction.

It is well, under the circumstances, that both are suited by their respective rÔles, otherwise the somewhat difficult lot of the Resident Commissioner might be rendered even more trying than it is.

Tinomana is not young, and she is not lovely now, though one can see that she has been beautiful, as so many of the soft-eyed island women are, long ago. She has had her romance, however, and as we sit on her verandah, drinking and eating the cocoanut and banana of ceremony, the grey-haired white man who is husband of the queen tells the story to me of her love and his, just as it happened, once upon a time.

In 1874 the Cook Islands were an independent group, governed by their own chiefs, or Arikis. The Arikis had much more power in those days than they are now allowed to exercise. They could order the execution of any subject for any cause; they could make war and end it: and no ship dared to call at the islands without their permission. They owned, as they still own, all the land, and their wealth of various kinds made them, in the eyes of the natives, millionaires as well as sovereigns.

“Women’s rights” were a novelty to England thirty years ago, but in the Cook Islands they were fully recognised, even at that early period. The most powerful of the Arikis was Makea—then a girl, now an elderly woman, but always every inch a queen, and always keeping a firm hand on the sceptre of Raratonga. Any Cook Islands postage-stamp will show Makea as she was some ten years ago. In 1874 Makea and her consort, Ngamaru, were making plans for the marrying of Tinomana, a young Raratongan princess closely related to Makea. Tinomana would shortly become an Ariki, or queen, herself, and her matrimonial affairs were, in consequence, of considerable importance.

What the plans of Raratonga’s rulers for Tinomana may have been matters little. Tinomana was pretty, with splendid long black hair, large soft brown eyes, an excellent profile, and a complexion little darker than a Spaniard’s. She was also self-willed, and could keep a secret as close as wax when she so desired. She had a secret at that time, and it concerned no South Sea Islander, but a certain good-looking young Anglo-American named John Salmon (grandson of a Ramsgate sea-captain, Thomas Dunnett), who had lately landed at Raratonga from the trading schooner Venus, and had been enjoying a good deal of the pretty princess’s society, unknown to the gossips of the island. It was a case of love at first sight; for the two had not been more than a few days acquainted when they came privately to James Chalmers, the famous missionary, then resident in Raratonga, and begged for a secret marriage.

James Chalmers refused promptly to have anything to do with the matter, and furthermore told Tinomana that he would never marry her to any white man, no matter who it might be. In his opinion such a marriage would be certain to cause endless trouble with the other Arikis—apart from the fact that Queen Makea was against it. So the lovers went away disconsolate. Raratonga was keeping holiday at the time, because a great war-canoe was to be launched immediately, and a dance and feast were in preparation. But Tinomana and her lover were out of tune with the festivities, and no woman in the island prepared her stephanotis and hibiscus garlands for the feast, or plaited baskets of green palm leaves to carry contributions of baked sucking-pig and pineapples, with as heavy a heart as the little princess.

On the day of the feast an idea came to Salmon. There were two schooners lying in Avarua harbour. One, the Coronet, had for a captain a man named Rose, who was as much opposed to Salmon’s marriage as Chalmers himself. The Humboldt schooner, on the other hand, had a friend of Salmon’s in command. From him some help might be expected. Salmon visited him secretly, found that he was willing to assist, and arranged for an elopement that very night. Tinomana was willing; nobody suspected; and the feast would furnish a capital opportunity.

There was no moon that evening, happily for the lovers, for the smallest sign would have awaked the suspicions of the watching Coronet. When the feast had begun, and all Raratonga was making merry with pig and baked banana, raw fish and pineapple beer, Tinomana contrived to slip away and get back to her house. Womanlike, she would not go without her “things”; and she took so long collecting and packing her treasures—her silk and muslin dresses, her feather crowns, her fans and bits of cherished European finery from far-away Auckland—that the suspicions of a prying girl were aroused. Out she came, accompanied by two others—all handmaidens to Tinomana—and charged the princess with an intention to elope. Tinomana acknowledged the truth, and ordered the girls to hold their tongues, offering them liberal rewards. This was not enough, however; the three girls demanded that Tinomana, in addition to buying their silence, should shield them from the possible wrath of the great Makea by taking them with her. She was forced to consent; and so, when the impatient lover, lurking in the darkness near the harbour, saw his lady coming at last, she came with three attendants, and almost enough luggage to rival Marie Antoinette’s encumbered flight to Varennes.

Eventually, however, the party put off in a canoe, the girls lying flat in the bottom, with Tinomana crouching beside them and Salmon holding a lighted torch, which he waved in the air as they went. For the boat had to pass close by the Coronet, and Captain Rose, somehow or other, had become suspicious, and young Salmon knew he would think nothing of stopping any boat that could not give an account of itself. So Salmon took the torch, to look like a fishing-boat going out with spears and torches to the reef, and, paddling with one hand while he held the light aloft with the other, he passed the Coronet safely, knowing well that his face would be unrecognisable at a distance of fifty yards or so in the wavering shadow of the flame.

Beyond the reef lay the Humboldt waiting. Tinomana and her maids and her luggage were swung up the side with small ceremony; Salmon hurried after, and a small but welcome breeze enabled the schooner to slip out to sea unnoticed in the dark. She made for Mangaia, another of the Cook Islands, some hundred and fifty miles away, and reached it in a couple of days. But the Humboldt had hardly made the land when the dreaded Coronet appeared on the horizon, carrying every stitch of sail, and with her decks, her “Jacob’s-ladder,” and her very yardarms crowded by furious Raratongans. The fugitives were caught!

At first they had not been missed. The islanders were feasting and drinking, the Arikis were unsuspicious, and the Coronet had seen only a fishing-canoe with a solitary man on board gliding out to the reef. But with the morning light came the knowledge that Tinomana was absent from her palace, that Salmon had not come home, and that the Humboldt was gone. Raratonga was enraged, and all the more so because pursuit appeared for the moment to be impossible. They knew that the Humboldt had probably made for Mangaia; but the breeze had died away, and the Coronet, her sails flapping idly against her rakish masts, lay helpless in harbour. Some brilliant spirit, however, proposed that the schooner should be towed out, in the hope of catching a breeze beyond the reef; and half a dozen great whaleboats, manned by powerful arms, were harnessed to the Coronet’s bows. Out she came through the opening in the foaming coral reef, with screaming and splashing and tugging at oars, into the blue, open sea, and beyond the shelter of the peaky, purple hills. The breeze was met at last, the boats cast off and dropped astern, and the Coronet, carrying half Raratonga on board, set sail for Mangaia.

Once within the range of the Humboldt the Coronet lowered a boatful of armed men, and the latter made for the schooner lying-to under the shelter of the Mangaian hills. Captain Harris, of the Humboldt, however, ordered his crew to shoot down the first man who attempted to board, and the attacking boat thought better of it. Beaten by force they tried diplomacy, in which they were more successful. They told Captain Harris that all his cargo of valuable cotton, lying on the wharf at Raratonga ready for shipment, would be destroyed unless he gave the princess back. This meant absolute ruin, and the captain had to submit. Salmon told Tinomana that it was best to give in for the present, as they were caught; but that the parting would be only for a time. And back to Raratonga went the disconsolate princess, bereft of her lover and her stolen wedding, and with the anticipation of a good scolding to come from the indignant Arikis.

For some months after this disaster Salmon wandered about from island to island, living now in Raiatea, now in Flint Island, now in Mauke—always restless and always impatient. At last he judged the time had come to make a second attempt, and tried to obtain a passage to Raratonga.

Schooner after schooner refused to take him, but finally a little vessel called the Atalanta braved the wrath of the Arikis and brought him back. During his absence time had worked in his favour, and the opposition to the marriage was now much weaker. The Arikis received him coolly and fined him twenty pounds’ worth of needles, thread, and tobacco for his late excursion, but they no longer refused to let him see Tinomana. The missionary, however, still objected to the marriage, and as he was the only clergyman available for the ceremony it seemed as if things, on the whole, were “getting no forrader.”

At this juncture the great Makea stepped in, and with the charming variability common to her sex, took the part of the lovers against all Raratonga as strongly as she had before opposed their union. She was not then in Raratonga, but in another of the Cook Islands, Atiu. From thence she sent the schooner Venus to Raratonga, ordering the captain to fetch Tinomana and Salmon to Atiu, where the local missionary would marry them, or Makea would know the reason why.

Raratonga—obstinate Raratonga!—still refused to give its princess to a foreign adventurer, though it trembled at the thought of defying the Elizabethan Makea. A band of warriors came down to the harbour to see that Salmon did not get on board the ship. As for Tinomana, they did not dare to oppose her departure, when the head of the house had actually summoned her. But the princess had no notion whatever of going alone. Salmon was smuggled on board in the dusk and hidden under a bunk. A pile of mats and native “pareos,” or kilts, was placed over him, and there, in the heat of the tropic night, he lay and sweltered, while the Venus swung to her cable and the warriors hunted the ship and found nothing. When they went off, baffled, the schooner put to sea. A Raratongan vessel, still suspicious, chased her to Atiu, but Makea informed the pursuing crew that it would be bad for their health to land on her property unasked; and, as this great Pacific Queen had, and has, the reputation of keeping her word when it is passed, the Raratongans did not dare to set foot on shore. This time it was they who went home disconsolate.

And so the young couple were married “and lived happily ever after.” Tinomana and her consort now reside at Arorangi, Raratonga, in their long, low house, set among frangipani trees and oranges, and covered with flowering tropical creepers, and seldom or never occupy their palace. Tinomana’s five children are dead; she herself is growing old, but the memory of those long-past years of adventure and romance is still with her. Her life glides quietly and dreamily by, within the sound of the humming ocean surf, under the shadow of the purple Raratongan hills. She has had her day, and there remain the quiet sunset and the softened twilight, before the time of dark.

The queen had little to say to us, for she does not speak English, nor is she shrewdly curious about men and things outside of sleepy Raratonga, like her sister sovereign, Makea. She smiled a good deal, and said some polite things about my dress, which illustrated a new fashion, and seemed to interest her more than anything else connected with the call. I had brought a gift with me for Tinomana, a silk scarf of a peculiarly screaming blue, and I presented it before I took my leave with some politenesses that the royal consort rapidly translated for me. The queen was much pleased with the gift, and began trying its effect on several different hats at once. Then we had some more cocoanut water and said good-bye, and drove home again in the yellow sunset.

The crabs were getting noisy as we passed along a soft bit of sandy road close by the shore. They are fairly active all day, and at night seem to wake up a little more completely than before. One can hear them rattling and scratching loudly all over the stones and rubbish about the shore; the ground is riddled with their holes—as we pass, they dart in at their front doors as swiftly as spiders, and stand looking cautiously round a comer till the threatening apparition is gone. They are not nice things, these crabs—they are tall and spindly and insectlike in build, with a scrawny body set on eight spider-like legs, and ugly, sharp, thin claws. They live on the land, but haunt the beach a good deal, because of the dÉbris to be found there, and they are such nasty feeders that not even the natives will eat them, which is saying a good deal.

They have an uncanny fancy for coming into houses. If your residence is not raised up on a good Verandah, which they cannot surmount, you may be alarmed some night by a ghostly tapping and ticking on the floor, like nothing you have ever heard or dreamed of before, and while you are wondering fearfully what the sound may be, you will suddenly become aware of something clumsy and noisy scrambling among the mosquito curtains of your bed. At this, if you are of common human mould, you will arise hastily, tangling yourself up in the curtains as you do so, and call loudly for a light. And when one is brought, behold the offender scuttling hastily away on eight long thin legs into the outer dark, without stopping to make an explanation or an apology. You are so annoyed that you put on a dressing-gown and follow him out on the verandah, a stick in your hand and murder in your heart; but just as you reach the steps, there is a loud “flump” on the floor, and a centipede as big as a sausage, with a writhing black body and horrible red legs and antennae, flashes past the edge of your sweeping draperies. At this you give it up, and get back to your mosquito curtains.

You are just falling asleep, when——— Good Heavens! what is it?

Surely nothing but a burglar could have made that fearful noise in the outer kitchen!—a burglar, or a madman, or both in one. It sounds as if some one were beating somebody else with an iron bucket. Perhaps it may be only a native dog chasing a cat. Up go the curtains once more, letting half the mosquitoes in the island in, and off the wretched traveller sets for the kitchen, accompanied by a brave but pallid hostess, who says she is extremely sorry her husband would choose this week for going away from home.

There he is! there is the author of the noise—a black, bristly, incredibly hideous hermit crab as big as a biscuit—out of his shell, and fighting like grim death in an empty kerosene tin, with another crab nearly as big, and quite as vicious. Number one has got too big for the secondhand univalve shell he lived in, and is touring the country trying to replace it. Number two, also out-growing his clothes, has got half a broken sardine box in the kerosene tin (which acts as ash-bucket to the house), and he thinks it is the loveliest new shell he has ever seen. So, unluckily, does the other crab, and they are in the act of putting it to ordeal by combat, when we invade the scene of the battle, and rudely shake the crabs and the shells and the sardine tin all off the end of the verandah together.

“What on earth brings crabs into people’s houses?” you ask amazedly, as you go back to bed again. It seems an insane action for any sensible crab, considering that we are half a mile from the sea.

“Pure cussedness,” says my friend wrathfully. “They even climb up the verandah posts, and sit among the flowers. ‘What for? Spite, I think; there isn’t anything more ill-natured in the world than a hermit crab.”

If it is not a moonlight night, now, we get to sleep at last, but if it is, and the oranges are ripe———

Well, that is the time the “mor kiri-kiris” choose to perform their orisons; and when they are playing the devil with the holy peace and calm of midnight on the roof, not even a fourth mate newly come off his watch, could sleep below.

“Here, you blank, blank, blank, unspeakable, etcetera, let go that orange!”

“I shan’t, blank your double-blank limbs and wings! I got it first!”

“Then just look out, you mangy, fox-faced, clumsy-winged beast, for I’ll rip the inside out of your rotten carcase with my claws.”

“Like to see you!” (somewhat muffled with stolen orange).

“You will!”

Shriek, shriek, yell, howl, scream.

“You’ve bitten my toe off, you trebly-blanked vermin!”

“Meant to!”

“Clear off!”

“Won’t!”

“Come on again, then!”

“Pax! pax! here’s the great pig with fur on its head that lives in the house, coming out with a gun. I’m off.”

“So am I, but we’ll go back again the moment it goes in.” That is the way one sleeps in the orange season, in a place that happens to be popular with the “mor kiri-kiri,” or flying-fox—a bat with a furry body as big as a cat’s, long sharp white teeth, a head exactly like a fox, and the crustiest disposition of anything living on the island.