in the lace coat, who was he? A Frenchman dressed up for the occasion? They knew better than to believe him. This was a poser! The moment was a critical one, and fast rushing from the ridiculous to the tragic. The French soldiers were all around eager to fire. What a capital excuse if they could officially report to France that they were forced to shoot the natives in order to protect the English Consul! He had presence of mind to take in the position at a glance, explained it to the chiefs, begged them for their lives to remain perfectly still and let him haul down the flag. They obeyed. The flag was hauled down, the soldiers re-escorted the Consul on board, and the natives hoisted the Union Jack again, and there it is now waving in the breeze as we pass ! The rebellion here is both to natives and Frenchmen a delightful variation from the monotony of island life. At both ends of the village are forts occupied by little French soldiers, and no one is allowed to go beyond those boundaries without a pass from the commanding officer. A dozen more soldiers are drilling under a tree, for the heat is no joke. My head aches even under a straw hat and puggery, and I envy for the first time the ladies who carry umbrellas. However, there is a better protection than a clumsy umbrella to be had gratis everywhere. I pick some cold young banana leaves and stuff them into my hat, and the headache vanishes. This does very well among English people, but not among the politer Gauls. My companions immensely enjoy seeing me forced every now and then to raise my hat in response to a salute. They know what is going to happen, and are quite prepared for my sudden-remembering confusion when leaves fall out and down over me, to the astonishment of monsieur. The natives have cutely divided themselves into two parties: Friendlies and Rebels, exactly in old New Zealand Maori fashion. The Rebels are supposed to be strictly isolated at the other side of the mountain, and thus to be cut off from supplies of European luxuries; but in reality they get everything they want from the Friendlies, who carry on a roaring trade with them, and will be sorry when the rebellion is over. Passing through a gate at the end of the town I see a wooden hut about ten feet square, with a turf wall round it about two feet high, and I mightily offend a little French gendarme, who is walking up and down there, by asking him where the fort is. He eyes me frowningly. Can this sacré Anglais, he is thinking, be making fun of our WAR? It appears I am in the fort, and he hastens to boast that at the other end of the town there are plenty of cannon and ammunition ready to be sent here whenever required. After a few respectfully polite remarks his manner softens. I discover that he is just out from home. When I ask him how he likes Raiatea he turns away angrily and tells me I have broken rule in opening the gate and coming twenty yards beyond it to the fort. "Monsieur must retire." Poor Pandore! What would he not give to be back again in barracks, in his beloved Paris! As I retire I hear him humming a tune to keep up his spirits. I fancy it is the real old "barrack ballad":: "Deux gendarmes, un beau dimanche L'un portait le sardine blanche Le premier dit d'une voix sonore ' Brigadier,' répondit Pandore, ' Brigadier, vous avez raison !'" Raiatea is thirty miles in circumference. Both it and Tahoa are encircled by one vast coral reef, on which there are also several islets. It is mountainous and picturesque, the highest peak being 3389 feet. The steamer goes into the great lagoon inside the coral reef by the passe Te aoa piti, between the islands of Tetaro and Taoru, running quite close to Tetaro, where lies stranded a memento of the old days of island trade-the wreck of a small schooner. The passe is not an easy one to navigate, and our skipper studies his maps carefully, for this is the first time he has been through it. The native pilot who takes us in does not speak English, and the captain does not speak French or Tahitian; so they have a lively time of signs, amusing to us though not so to the captain, who with his hand on the engine bell bursts occasionally into violent questions in English, and recollecting himself stops in the middle very funnily to resume pantomime. The people are not nearly so hospitable here as in Tonga, Fiji, or Samoa. They are always on the look out for money or money's worth, or a deal in shells or nicknacks. In this style : A pleasant-looking man comes out of his house wearing a broad, hospitable smile, and we have the following dialogue in bad French :"Do you smoke?" "Yes," reply I, thinking this the beginning of a chat, and, perhaps, the prelude to an invitation to visit him in his cool house of bamboo. "Then" (holding out his hand) "give me some tobacco." How different from dear old Tonga, with all its faults! To appreciate native rule under occasional advice from an English consul, to appreciate Maori men and women at their best-athletic, jolly, sober, kava-drinking, hospitable, comparatively modest, proud, obliging without pay, clean-housed-one has first to see Tongan life, then to see the effects of French rule in the Society and neighbouring groups. And yet we know that fifty years ago the Tahitians were a far simpler and more lovable people than the Tongans, and that Tahiti is still the most beautiful and most richly-endowed island in Melanesia. O CHAPTER X. MISSIONARIES. "Is it nothing to you all ye that pass by?" NCE more at Apia, amid the bustle of departure, Samoan bright-eyed, smiling boys and girls, with nothing on but a waist-cloth, their healthy-looking, cocoanut-oiled, light-brown skins glistening in the sun, are hawking strings of beads and coral and coloured beans, model catamarans, and large pandanus baskets of coral, sixpence each, including the basket; Savage Island1 men are offering fibre hats-capital hats at a shilling each-ripe green and ripe yellow oranges (one sixpenny basket which I bought contained 127 delicious oranges), bananas, yams-as many as you can carry for sixpence; a Hindoo is pressing us to buy photographs; ordinary white traders, German agents, Government and consular officials and their wives are bidding good-bye to friends; Mormon elders are seeing off one of their number-a tall, thin, gaunt-faced, pleasant man, in a balloon-shaped, military undress, Prussian cap of the time of Frederick the Great, and in a long, black, threadbare surtout-a faithful apostle who lately arrived by the 'Frisco mail-boat, and is coming on with us to Tongatabu "without scrip or purse," literally, without a sixpence in his pocket since he started in the Northern Hemisphere! But all sink into insignificance before a much more important personage who now arrives as we are getting under way. The English missionary sweeps alongside in the best boat in the island the whale-boat of the London Missionary Society. Of boats and of steam yachts (yachts like Lord Brassey's, costing £6000 a year each to keep up, supported by children's pence), of these as of everything else the modern evangelist to the heathen has the very best, and he wears the air of a great chief. Truly the missionary world is a wonderful world! In the boat with this 1 66 Savage Islanders" were so named by Capt. Cook because they attacked him. They were never cannibals. The 5000 inhabitants live peaceably under an absolutely pure republican form of government. new visitor to our steamer-doubtless an amiable, sincere Christian ; I do not even know his name- -are his wife and three English-dressed converts to a "helping league "-the young Samoan widow of a white trader, a young half-caste widow (both in hats, with profusion of ostrich feathers), and a plainer half-caste girl. It is said that this religious, exclusive little league, to gather in the souls of their lessdeserving neighbours-attractive though it was, at first, to idle natives and half-castes-now languishes. The Samoan young women find, if they join it, that they are expected to relinquish the pleasures of the dance and song. They are willing, nay, delighted, to sing hymns for any number of hours at a stretch, but give up dancing, of which they are so passionately fond? that is quite another matter. Therefore many backslide, which is not an unmixed grief to rival sects. As I look over the steamer's side into the smartly-cushioned and manned missionary whale-boat, much that I have seen and heard and read fills my mind, like the sound of a rush of remembered waters, and I feel a strange impulse and longing to unburthen myself of not one but many chapters on this burning, this deeply-important subject; but I must content myself with one short one, and straightway I jot in my notebook the scene I have just described, and so commit myself to Chapter X., and to the serious subject of missionary tactics in the South Seas, aye, and to much abuse and, perchance, misrepresentation from many persons with whom I would fain live in peace and on good terms. But those who carry the burthen of the cross of doubt must not fear to shirk facts. In this delicate subject of missionary enterprise, as in all others, it is ultimately of the best service to both God and our neighbour to face the truth. And the truth is, that all the churches-Free Church, Wesleyan, Roman Catholic, and Anglican are bitter enemies in these regions, and would rather a native remained as he was till they could get at him with their special nostrum than let him slip away to heaven by another route. Further, they are ready to spend any amount of money, and to use unscrupulously all the temporal and spiritual powers they can get hold of to damage and circumvent their competitors for island souls. Sometimes, in cases of great danger to their prestige, Protestants combine and try to crush the Roman Catholics; but the rapprochement caused by this amiable concert lasts no longer than its special occasion. This mutual hatred touched the ridiculous in Tonga when it extended to the alphabet. "The Tongan language is very soft, and |