melody or harmony. When they have finished the owner of the house sends round a girl with a bottle of Morton's salad oil, mixed with red powder. This is rubbed on their cheeks and hair. Musk scent, which they love, is thrown on their heads. Then they look not unlike a lot of cannibals after a good feed of 'long pig."" Whitcombe stopped; there was silence, and we were glad, for thoughts of Morton's salad oil, and of matted drums beaten with sticks, and of tau-togas yelled by red-powdered Rotuman girls, seemed to jar upon the lovely night and the everlasting stars, strong-gleaming with steely-white tropical light, and upon the dark, unfathomable, illimitable sea, rolling its great billows around us. Suddenly the Malthusian began to recite in sonorous, but low voice "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! We left him finishing Childe Harold to the three Samoan girls, who did not understand English, and we went below and turned in. A CHAPTER III. THE FRIENDLY ISLANDS. "Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree, TONGATABU. LL the way, 1100 miles from Opua to Tongatabu, we have a stormy passage of four and a half days, during which time we make acquaintance with our fellow-passengers, and settle down in little groups after the English fashion. Unfortunately we have not a single Frenchman on board. When he is not sea-sick there is no fellowtraveller like our genial hereditary enemy to keep a ship's company together by his light-hearted gaiety and unexclusive politeness. We have only one German-he of our smoking saloon clique-always in good spirits, ready to laugh and talk with everybody. Three chatty elderly ladies, and a few English and Colonial tourists and commercial travellers and invalids, make up the rest of our society. I do not know how the elderly ladies feel, but I cannot help thinking that a trip among these islands in rough seas, alternating with very hot weather, to peer at a lot of half-naked brown men and women is not in their line. The ladies are very cheery, and determined to put a good face on their troubles; but I fancy they ever get more discomfort than pleasure out of this trip. At daybreak on the fifth day the cry of land brings us all tumbling up on deck, and we gaze at last upon a South Sea island! Just under the red of sunrise on the starboard bow, dimly through the glass, silhouetted against a pale, yellow-green sky, stand, as it were, right out of the ocean, the feathery tops of cocoanut trees, and nearer, puff! puff! puff! one after another, stretching almost a mile along the horizon, like shells fired from a line of forts and exploding in the water, leap twenty feet into the air little heaps of white spray. These are the waves breaking over a line of coral rocks, and up through submarine caves in the rocks. The first impression I feel is certainly not a very grand one to record. The old nursery rhyme, which I am positive I have not heard for fifty years, and to the melody of which I was rocked to sleep many and many a time when a baby, comes back, singing in my ears, and will not be denied "He ate their fingers one by one, First the toe and then the thumb, And here I am at last, standing over a cargo of drapery, tinned meats, Australian wines, house timber, church seats, and a pulpit, coming to see the royal foe of my earliest youth! Another pleasant old delusion gone! The late Thakombau, king of Fiji, would have been a better representative cannibal than King George I. of Tonga ever was; and indeed, in spite of the traces of human ovens in Tongatabu, and in spite of mariners' stories of men eating their wives, English people who have been thirty years in the country, and have studied its past history, assert that the Tongans never were cannibals in the ordinary acceptation of the term. As for the present young king, George II., he is a gentleman in a well-made suit of English broadcloth! And the quarterings on the Royal Arms of Tonga are composed of the dove of peace facing the crossed swords of the Rosicrucians, three stars on another field, with a crown on the fourth. Soon the low land rises in the air. We enter a wide bay. Its port arm is formed by the long coast-line of Tongatabu, and to starboard is a string of many islands of all sizes, from mountainous Eua (where five miles from the shore there is convenient anchorage four and a half miles deep) down to a tiny thing, looking in the distance like an oldfashioned four-decker in full sail, with tall cocoanut trees for masts. Eua is a fertile island, nine miles south-east of Tongatabu. It is six miles long and four miles wide. It has a rich belt of cocoanut trees round the shore, is well grassed on the highlands, and was lately rented as a sheep station by some New Zealanders; but sheep do not thrive as well as cattle in any part of the South Seas, so the venture turned out a failure, and the sheep have been removed. It has a governor at a salary of £60, has five villages, and a population of 361 sturdy Tongans, mostly fishermen and women. Land lies ahead of us, but so low that it is visible only in spots. All round our steamer is the dark water which the Greeks called purple, an expression oft criticised by moderns, who sneer at the poets and deny the existence of such a hue in the great deeps. A sharp-cut, yet imaginary, distant line the edge of the unseen coral which underlies the whole island, and creeps far out to sea divides the purple from a pale green broad expanse, which stretches ahead of us nearly to the horizon. There, on the starboard bow, the view is bounded by the row of circular islands which stand up out of the blue sea, a darker green, glittering like a chain of huge emeralds in a broad band of sapphire. The intense paleness of the green colour in the bay is caused by the shallowness of the water. The masses of underlying coral are only two to four feet beneath the surface. The sea around our steamer looks a deeper purple from the contrast. "We enter," says the captain, explaining the chart and pointing out the course with his finger, "by the eastern passage, leaving the high island of Eua far outside on the starboard hand, through bold water till we reach the island of Nakakoa, then turn suddenly into the narrows at a right angle, reefs on both sides. When we leave Tongatabu, on our way to Haapai, we go out on the north-west side by the Egeria Passage, round by the cocoanut-wooded island of Atala. The Egeria is the best passage for vessels not drawing more than eighteen feet." He has no time to tell us more. As we near the green water he climbs into the foretop, and sits there guiding the steamer along the swift tide, past the reefs, through the blue, narrow passage, with pale green water rushing and tumbling on either side. "Port!" Then we wheel to starboard, the steamer answering her helm beautifully, and darting away from the green water. Not too much swing, or we shall be on the opposite reef, whose jagged surface would tear and rip up the stoutest ship's bottom in a jiffy. "Stead-y!" "Steady it is, sir!" "Stand by the engines!" "Half speed!" and we whirl round the buoy. At this point there is an uncanny appearance about the green waves, for they swirl over each other on both sides of us at the same time. I, for one, hold my breath for a moment-I don't know what the others do-and I fancy I can see the dark coral rocks under the breaking water. It is a relief when the passage widens, the reefs recede, and we head for Mount Zion. This is a bold, abrupt rising ground, in old time occupied by the historical, great round fort which was besieged by the chief Finow, an invader from Haapai, with 170 canoes and 15 white men, including William Mariner, in charge of the big cannons from the Port-au-Prince. Now it is peacefully crowned by the large unsightly church which gives it its Bible name, which has a missionary history, and makes a good landmark for ships. Below the church, around the edge of the beautiful bay, nestling among cocoanut trees, stands white Nukualofa, the capital of the kingdom of Tonga. At midnight, as we sit yarning in the smoking saloon, alongside Nukualofa wharf, tired yet very wakeful, looking forward to an exciting first day ashore on a South Sea island, a handsome old Tongan gentleman, a scion of the Royal Family, in bare head and legs and a long black frock coat-Junea (pronounced Sunea) Mafileo, the late Jioaji Tubou's youngest nephew, with a figure-head and fine-cut features like a Louis Quatorze stepped out of a Versailles portrait gallery-looks in upon us, carrying a large black umbrella under his arm. We at once invite him to join our company. With a dignified smile and without a word he walks into the smokingroom, where the well-known Jack Castles of Fiji and buccaneering reputation—Hayes' old chum, as I have already mentioned-is spinning one of his tremendous, impossible yarns about old days. Jack is going to marry Junea's grand-niece, a girl young enough to be his grand-daughter. This princess was a deck passenger last month. Our good-natured skipper promised Junea to look after her, and give her a biscuit! Junea is eighty-five years of age, has false teeth, but does not wear spectacles, because (so he says) he is not an old man yet! Intelligent, dignified, and seemingly, as a matter of course, out on a cruise of enjoyment in the middle of the night, to see if anything turns up, he seats himself beside Mr. Castles, and with grand seigneur ceremoniousness, bows to everyone. We are delighted with his smile, his bearing, and his terse replies (as interpreted by Jack Castles) to our questions. Junea believes in one wife, he says; but we do not attach much weight to his present opinion after we ascertain that he has had thirtyfive children, whose names he can remember, besides a good many more whom he has forgotten. As the king's uncle he is a sort of treasurer, a real sinecurist at £150 a year, for he never signs a paper or does anything in return for the salary. "Dare we give him a drink?" I ask. What will "Certainly," says Mr. Jack. "He is a member of the Royal Family, a great chief, and exempt from the liquor laws. you have, old man, whisky and soda, and a biscuit?" Junea made a gesture signifying that whisky and soda was the very thing. So we touched the bell for the steward. "By-the-bye that reminds me," says the captain, "to warn you that you must be careful not to give a native liquor under any pretext. No |