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THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM.

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excited missionaries dashed up the ladder and fell upon their flock. It was a demonstration that might well have been spared, for the wharf was now filling with people, and it was the interest of the mission, as well as of the exiles, that they should return as the king's subjects, and not as members of a Church of which he disapproved. Meanwhile the chief men among the exiles, William Maealiuaki and Matealona, landed to report themselves to Tukuaho, the Premier, and we pulled to the wharf and landed among the crowd of sight-seers. I tried in vain to detect any enthusiasm, but, with the exception of the near relations of the exiles, who could be distinguished from the others by their eager questioning of the native crew of our boat, the people, who numbered perhaps 150, seemed to have come from mere motives of curiosity. Mrs S., the daughter of one of the missionaries, explained the absence of demonstration by saying that we had been expected on the previous Sunday, when large numbers had awaited our arrival; but this explanation scarcely accounted for the absence of the townspeople, who had had fully two hours' notice of the arrival of the steamer. The people assembled were scarcely more than would have come to see the arrival of the ordinary monthly steamer. Mrs S. went on to say that affairs were less satisfactory than had been hoped. The king had gone away to Haapai to finish the building of a church. There had been a free fight between the lads of the Government and the Wesleyan colleges. The Collector of Customs had had a difference with the Premier about a copra contract, and, to the great inconvenience of the public, had closed the Customs office for a whole day as a protest. Moreover, “certain

persons" had been endeavouring to set my native colleagues against me, and they were so demoralised by the turn affairs had taken that they talked freely of resignation. There were, in short, rumours of wars everywhere, and not a shilling had been taken as taxes since the High Commissioner left a month before. A little later I heard the other side of the story, which was that an enterprising copra-trader had persuaded the native Premier to proclaim that the Government would accept copra in lieu of money for taxes, and to sell the copra thus obtained to him at a fixed rate; and Tukuaho, being new to the business, had been easily persuaded that the offer was disinterested, and had acted upon it, to the great indignation of the rival traders and the detriment of the Government, as will be explained hereafter.

But the worst news of all, although the least unexpected, was that the Free Church ministers were up in arms. They felt, naturally enough, that in Mr Baker they had lost a powerful champion, and that the Government was no longer to use its machinery for the annoyance of their adversaries, the Wesleyans. The return of the exiles was a triumph for the minority, for among them were the only persons of rank who remained faithful to the old Church. Mr Baker was their prophet and their defensor fidei, who alone could keep alive the spirit of enthusiasm, and insure the punctual payment of their salaries from the annual mission collections. Naturally enough, therefore, they "talked lotu" from their pulpits-that is to say, they vilified the rival sect, and hinted that the removal of Mr Baker was but the preface to the seizure of the country by Great Britain. Now every Tongan is hysterically patri

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otic, and has a deep-seated conviction that the sovereigns. of the other Powers do not sleep well of nights for pondering how they may plausibly compass the enthralment of Tonga. To accuse the chiefs who had taken office in the new Cabinet of selling their country to England was the surest way to make them extremely unpopular. This had been the news from Haapai, and the minds of the people in Tonga, both white and black, were deeply tinged with pessimism. There was a general undefined feeling that something was going to happen.

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My first business was to see my colleague, George Tukuaho, who had sent to say that he was confined to his house with a bad headache. On my last visit to Tonga, four years before, he was just recovering from a serious illness; and though I had seen much of his father, Tungi, I had only conversed once with Tukuaho, and then only upon such general subjects as the comparison of the military genius of Julius Cæsar and the first Napoleon, whose lives I had found him reading in his own language. He was then commandant of the king's Guards, who numbered twenty men, and in that capacity he had had the shrewdness to outwit Mr Baker, then all-powerful. It had suggested itself to the Premier's fertile brain that military service might be turned to account against the stiff-necked Wesleyans, and he had accordingly compelled a number of the College boys to enlist in the militia. They were first required to take the oath, but this they refused to do, unless they were told to what they were going to bind themselves. A refusal to take the oath being at that time in the nature of sedition, they were

THE NATIVE PRIME MINISTER.

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charged with that offence before the police court; but Kubu, the new Minister of Police, who was then Police

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Magistrate, was not a creature of Mr Baker, and dismissed the case. This would not do at all, and Mr Baker

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