Many pens have written of Vavau. Missionaries have extolled it for its sensational conversion to Christianity; journalists have described it as a future health-resort; a naval officer has enlarged upon the natural defences of its harbour; Byron, mixing up the two books on the Pacific of his day, Mariner's 'Tonga' and the 'Mutiny of the Bounty,' describes it in the "Island" with more rhyme than geographical accuracy; and lastly, Mr. St Johnstone, a sentimental young gentleman into whose soul the smell of cocoa-nut-oil had entered, raved of the beauty of its scenery and its women. In short, for its size and its distance from the civilised world, Vavau has had its full share of paper and printing-ink.

But it deserves it all. The harbour may be a little less safe, the girls on nearer inspection a little greasier and less virtuous than they are painted, but the scenery, and the indescribable romance that clings about the miniature precipices of the wild Liku, cannot be exaggerated.

The king had come and gone. By his great fono. he had sown a seed that would certainly have borne fruit if he page 162had stayed to water it, but this he would not consent to do. His church was still a-building in Vavau, and, unless he were there, the people would be wasting their time in selling oranges and copra. For a while he must do the work of God, after which he would return to his worldly duties. I was fain to acquiesce, hoping that as the king now knew more about the difficulties with which his Ministers had to contend, he would fight their battles for them in Vavau, the head centre of opposition.

A girl of Vavau.

But ere he had been gone a fortnight disquieting rumours reached us. He had held a fono, and had, as he promised, urged the payment of taxes; but in defiance of our orders the Governor, Manase, had accepted these taxes in money. This was a breach of implied contract with the firm who had tendered for the tax-copra, and although they had taken advantage of Tukuaho's inexperience to obtain the contract, and had therefore little claim upon our consideration, I felt that we were morally bound by Tukuaho's word to refuse to accept money for taxes until after Dec-page 163ember. The Free Church had taken this opportunity for holding their annual collections in Vavau, and the people, having sold all their available copra to get money for the church, had none left from which we could draw for the benefit of the contractor. With this news came stories of persecution in the Niuas. The Wesleyans were again being persecuted, and it was rumoured that the people had formed a league to pay no taxes. We held a Cabinet meeting, and resolved that the four principal members of the Cabinet, Tukuaho, Fatafehi, Kubu, and myself, should make a tour through the islands as far as Niua. The mail-steamer was to drop us at Niua on her way to the north, and a schooner was to be sent from Vavau to bring us back. But at Vavau the state of affairs was so unsatisfactory that it was decided to leave me behind to settle matters with the copra-contractor.

At the moment of entering the landlocked channel to the harbour one passes into a different atmosphere. The mood of the people of Tongatabu and Haapai matches their flat shores. They cover their restlessness with a crust of reserve even as the honeycomb of water-caves is hidden by plains and palm-groves: but in this land of orange-trees and wild precipices lives a different race. There is an unquiet activity about them, a vivacity of manner, a use of gesture to illustrate speech never seen among their cousins of the southern islands. The air, heavy with the scent of orange-blossom, is yet full of impulse. The men stride down to the wharf to meet the steamer, not ashamed to show that they have curiosity: the girls assemble in groups on the grassy road to chaff new-comers with an easy familiarity more respect-page 164able than the mission primness of the Tongatabu maidens, whose discreet deportment invites suspicion.

From the wharf one climbs a grassy slope, and straight-way one is in the orange-groves. The whole town is an orange-garden. Beneath the dark shiny foliage lie piles of rotting fruit, half-concealed by the rank couch-grass. Some of the trees are bent with their green load, others are white with blossom, for the crops succeed each other with little intermission. Behind the long rows of trees nestle the brown thatched houses, set down, as it were, upon the grass like the toy cottages of a child.

There is no beach here. The shores of the inlet are steep to, and the main road runs along the edge of the cliff. On this road stands the "Palace," a barn-like decaying structure of wood, from which the paint has long ago been washed by successive rainy seasons. Poor Laifone maintained the place with magnificence,—that is to say, there were marble mantelpieces (never paid for), cut-glass decanters, china, plate, whips, walking — sticks, boot-trees, ornaments, and saddles scattered in heaps over the furniture and floors, very dirty and in indescribable confusion; while the royal master of all this luxury slept on the floor, ate his meals with his fingers, and drank his liquor simply from the black bottle without the intermediary of a cutglass decanter. But now even those glories have departed, and the house is empty except when the king pays a flying visit to Vavau. Beyond the "Palace" were the stores, built on the seaward side of the road for greater facility in shipping copra, which comes next to oranges as the chief product of Vavau. These stores, kept by rival traders struggling for the custom of the passing Tongans, breed by page 165their juxtaposition an inextinguishable hate in the breasts of their proprietors. Flung together in this outer corner of the world, the Europeans did not scruple to slander one another to the natives, a fact that would alone suffice to account for the low estimation in which Europeans are held in Tonga. A wicked slander has it that no fresh meat can be eaten in Vavau because a sheep is too much for one family, and no man is on good enough terms with his neighbour to ask him to share with him. These men are nearly all substantial traders. Living harder lives, and dealing with a more energetic class of natives, than their compatriots in Tongatabu, more than one of the Germans could, if he sold out, realise £20,000, made in a few years from a wretched little store built and furnished without capital. The Englishmen, here as elsewhere in the Pacific, were behind the Germans in wealth, as they were in industry and frugality, and as they were before them in the faculty of meddling in the local politics.

I found that for once there was something resembling unanimity among the traders of Vavau, who were generally too busy to care about politics, and paid their taxes without grumbling. The "Chamber of Commerce," revived in Tongatabu for the joint object of worrying the new Government and of helping the insolvent publican by holding their thirst-provoking meetings at his hostelry, had lately sent a delegate to their brothers of Vavau to invite their co-operation. The unwonted excitement of a public meeting and a real live political agitation was so new, that for the moment personal enmities were laid aside. There were even suggestions by some wild enthusiast that a page 166"Chamber of Commerce" should be founded in Vavau itself; but though the more sober-minded renounced this proposal as impracticable, they eagerly assured the sister Chamber in Tongatabu that they might be counted upon for support in the righteous crusade against the Customs department. A deputation from the still-born Chamber of Commerce waited upon me the morning after my arrival. The fumes of the public meeting had had time to evaporate, and I found the deputation to be sensible fellows, whose views contrasted favourably with the intolerant resolution of the body which they represented. The good sense and moderation of the traders of Vavau is not to be measured by the ferocity of their language when convened in a public meeting,—a phenomenon not altogether unknown in other parts of the world.

Two of the traders, a Russian Jew and an Englishman, were accused by the police of carrying on an illicit trade in liquor. The law of Tonga forbids the sale of intoxicants to natives under a heavy penalty, and it speaks well for the good sense of the people themselves that the native Parliament has always confirmed this wise restriction. British subjects are, besides, liable to penalties before the Deputy-Commissioner's Court. Yet probably no offence is committed with greater impunity, owing to the difficulty of obtaining convictions when it is the interest of both seller and buyer to commit perjury.

I once tried a case in Fiji in which it appeared that the police had given an Indian coolie 6s. to buy whisky from a storekeeper, had watched him go empty-handed to the store and return with a bottle of the damning fluid in his hand, and had proved it by tasting to be nearly allied page 167to "Cape smoke" and "Nail-rod." The trader was a respectable and God-fearing man, and he appeared to his summons clad in decent broadcloth and patent-leather shoes without socks. He swore with awful solemnity that neither he nor any of his men had sold spirits to the Indian; he even produced a number of his assistants to corroborate his statement. The coolie swore that he had deliberately humbugged the policeman, and that he had picked the bottle up in the grass on the way from the store. He found another Indian to swear that he had put it there, and the trader got off. Two years later he retired with a fortune.

To return from this digression. My Russian was a man of substance, and was reputed to be a man of his word; my Englishman was an old offender, whose sense of honour had possibly been blunted by the joint effect of the climate and his own stock-in-trade,—so the cases had to be treated differently. I sent for the Russian Jew, and got him to make a clean breast of his delinquencies. I showed him how the law had been enacted for the protection of the Europeans themselves, for, with his thirty years' experience of the Pacific, none knew better than he what sort of a community was a native mob in liquor. He grew penitent, and promised solemnly never to sell liquor to a native again, adding that if I doubted his word he would give me a bond for £1000. I declined this characteristic offer, saying that I did not doubt his word, and I believe that he justified my confidence. With the Englishman I made shorter work, simply telling him there was evidence to obtain a conviction, but that as the police had of late been so remiss as to cast a doubt upon the efficacy of the law, I page 168should make them hold their hand until he neglected my warning, and offended again.

One of our first acts on landing had been to pay our official visit to the Governor, who had disobeyed and defied us. One always forms a clear mental picture of a person whose acts and utterances are familiar, and the picture is generally ill-drawn. I had imagined this truculent Free Churchman as a self-sufficient middle-aged

"Manase took it all in silence."

Tongan of the blatant kind. I found him a mild-mannered old gentleman, endowed with an apostolic saintliness of feature and expression that must have disarmed my colleagues had they not known their man so well Manase was a chief ot the third rank in Vavau, who owed his elevation to his zeal in persecuting the Wesleyans and his willingness to second Mr Baker in questionable transactions. Hitherto I had supposed him to have some page 169strength of character, if only in refusing to swing to the change of wind, but during this interview I realised that his steady opposition to us was due solely to crass and unimaginative stupidity. He was, in fact, quite incapable of realising that the old order had changed. We sat in a circle on the floor of his house and mad e conversation while the kava was brewed, and then, when the bowl had been removed, and we were so far alone that his household and their friends only formed a wall of ears on the other side of the reed-partition, Tukuaho and Fatafehi spoke their minds. Manase took it all in silence with furrowed brow and meek eyes, as who should say, "This too I forgive for the Gospel's sake!" As we left the house Tukuaho said that Manase would take his lesson to heart. I thought otherwise, and in this instance I was right.

Until the king's reign, as I have related elsewhere, the nobles of Vavau have always held a somewhat independent position. The Finau Ulukalala, the chiefs of the principal family, have, so long as history recalls them, been men of strong personal character and individuality. They seem to have acknowledged the Tui Kanakubolu as their suzerain from inclination rather than from necessity. To a Finau of the eighteenth century we owe Captain Cook's hospitable reception in Tonga—a hospitality that would have resulted in his massacre at Maofanga instead of in Hawaii but for a fortunate accident. To another was due the great revolution of 1799, and all the stirring times that succeeded it. His strong individuality, so wonderfully painted by an eye-witness, called forth from a Quarterly Reviewer of the day a comparison between him and the heroes of Greek tragedy. Another, Tuabaji, after re-page 170sisting for years the teachings of the missionaries, brought about that dramatic conversion of the whole island to Christianity that seemed to the missionaries so striking an instance of divine interposition. The line was not extinct. Though Manase was governor under the king, a Finau Ulukalala lived in the person of an unwieldy man of thirty, a nobele of the House of Lords, it is true, and the king's aide-de-camp, but in all other respects ignored by the Government. He was not a man of high moral elevation, nor could the missionaries point to him as a cheering instance of the efficacy of their work. He swore fluently in both German and English, and had a cultivated taste for strong waters. Finau was a ne'er-do-weel, but perhaps a scapegrace of the kind that is not past reform if intrusted with responsibility. There was no doubt about his being the hereditary ruler of the place: one might see that from the manner of the old men as he rode through the country. Surrounded by rowdy young booncompanions, holding no post that gave him a vestige of authority, he yet could not enter a village without holding an informal levée of all the inhabitants, while Manase the Governor might pass unnoticed. Possessed of such inherent influence, he was certainly worthy of trial as Manase's successor if the king could be induced to dismiss so ardent a Free Churchman, and to appoint in his place the descendant of the chiefs whom he had dispossessed. Perhaps guessing my sentiments, Finau attached himself to me throughout this visit. He offered to escort me to the Liku, and as I could best enjoy the scenery of this weird place alone, I was at some pains to give him the slip. But though I rode fast Finau rode faster, and page 171caught me up at that strange white burying-ground, hung between sky and sea at the precipice's edge He led me along the cliff to the open plain, whence, looking backward, one may see the hundred isles of Haafulu Hao spread out like a map Leaving our horses, we crept together along the razor-edge that still connected a rocky pinnacle with the cliff from which it jutted. Clinging to the roots of a starving screw-pine, we knelt and felt the shaft twang as the great seas boomed into the caverns at the cliff's base. We tried to shout against the roar of the trade-wind sweeping along the face of the rock-wall, but could not distinguish a word.

The Liku in Tongatabu.

This place has been a favourite point of departure for the love-sick of Vavau who would escape their misery. Finau said that the body of a girl of Halaufuli, who leapt hence into eternity a few months before, never reached the water, but was sucked inwards by the cliff, and so dashed to pieces on the sharp rocks at its foot. Whether the attraction of the cliff would always do this or not, death would be certain in falling page 172from such a height, even if the body struck the water only.

And here let me digress on the subject of suicide. The rough average rate of suicide in the Pacific—the figures dealt with are too insignificant for unvarying accuracy—is about equal to the rate for the United Kingdom, viz., 006 per mille of the population; but since most of the suicides in Europe are committed under the influence of mania or

Mourning.

extreme misery,—conditions that are generally absent in these favoured isles,—we may assume that the Pacific islanders have a predisposition towards self-destruction. The usual causes are lovers' quarrels, and the fear of being neglected in incurable illness. In the latter case suicide is a mere survival of the old custom that constrained a sick man to importune his relations to strangle or bury him alive,—itself an evolution from an earlier time when page 173the existence of a family depended upon its having no disabled members to protect. The lovers' quarrels that result in suicide are quite as trivial as those of civilised communities. On the sudden impulse of some slight misunderstanding the distressed lover resorts to the picturesque but inadequate method of climbing to the top of a cocoa-nut-palm and jumping off, with the usual result of a broken limb, a reconciliation with the beloved object, and permanent lameness. Of late years the cocoanut-tree has become less fashionable for men who are in earnest. These generally prefer a precipice, or, if their despair be of the more deliberate kind, poison, which, being a mere infusion of bark or leaves, must be drunk in such large quantity that it more often produces vomiting than death. The ancient mode of execution in Tonga—putting the condemned adrift in leaky canoes—still occasionally survives as a method of suicide. In February a schooner, bound from Niuatobutabu to Nukualofa, picked up a derelict canoe floating unharmed, with her paddles and baler in her, and a crumpled letter which ran as follows:—

810 6126 74 m2 127216 m2 892 162 9812 74 m2 m274 b4 810 m2 892 16274 16m807850 892 270

810 6126 74 m2 127216 m2 892 162 9812 74 m2 m274

Oku ikai te ma kataki ma ofa kia Foka te ma mate

b4 810 m2 892 16274 16m807850 892 270

be oku ma ofa kiate kimoutolu ofa atu

which being interpreted, ran—

We two cannot endure our love for Foka; we would rather die. We send our love to you all. Farewell.

It was a suicide. The poor girls had stolen the canoe, and had paddled themselves out of sight of land, and then, having scribbled their letter to their friend in cipher, they folded it, wrote the address on the back, and jumped overboard. I never heard what part Foka had played in the tragedy.

Persons intending suicide have also learned a lesson from the method of executions in Europe. Strangling with a cord of ngatu was common among the Polynesians of the olden time, but they seem never to have thought of hanging, and the idea at once struck them page 175as picturesque. Moreover, a man cannot very well strangle himself without help. A pretence of hanging is much resorted to by people who imagine themselves to be misunderstood, or who wish to frighten their friends into making some concession, because a dramatic effect can be produced with the least possible personal inconvenience.

Yet whenever confederates can be found to help, the South Sea Islander appears to prefer strangling to hanging. In Fiji a few years ago, when Australia was ringing with the achievements of the Kelly gang of bushrangers, a trader in Vanualevu, with the aid of a Sydney newspaper, was entertaining a gaping circle of Fijians by trying to make their flesh creep. In the minds of two of his listeners, youths from the neighbouring village, the seed fell upon a rich soil. Why should they be condemned to this life of spiritless toil in subjection to their chiefs and the Government, compelled to drudge in the fields and the tax-plantations, while the free, glorious bush lay behind them? If these foreigners, who could not exist without tinned meats, could live in the bush, how much more they who only wanted a wild yam or kaile roasted on the embers of an open fire? They could rob all the foreigners' stores, and with the plunder tempt the girls of the village to come and join them, and they would eat tinned meats and turkeys and fowls every day without having to pay for them or work to make money. They discreetly opened their project to one of their friends, but when he understood the full daring of the scheme he modestly withdrew, in words that were translated by the magistrate who afterwards held the inquest as, "Pardon me, but this thing is beyond my capacity." page 176So the three went out into the bush alone. During the first week they robbed two stores, and stabbed an elderly German in the back, escaping after each exploit into the impenetrable bush. They succeeded in establishing a real panic, so that none dared to leave the village alone; and the native police nightly thanked Providence that they had not stumbled across them. When the magistrate reached the place a week or two later with a force of police, he found that the outrages had ceased, and that nothing had been heard of the daring bushrangers for more than ten days. Weeks passed, and the confidence of the villagers was so far restored that they ventured armed into their gardens, believing that the bushrangers had gone to another part of the island. At last an old man, whose garden lay far afield, was drawn by the evidences of corruption to look into his yam-shed. Two bodies were there, decayed almost beyond recognition. One had a masi cord tied tightly round the neck, with both the ends free; the other had been strangled by a cord tied by one end to the upright post. Further search led to the discovery of a third body hanging by the neck from a tree. It was the poor trio, who had also found bushranging beyond their capacity. They got lonely, and longed for companionship to prop their failing courage; and when they could bear it no longer, and they had to choose between giving themselves up or suicide, they chose death by their own hands rather than by the unknown terrors of the law of the foreigners. So A and B put a noose round C's neck in the old style, and pulled at the ends till he was dead. Then B tied the end of his malo to the post, wound it round his neck, page 177and gave the end to A to pull. And when A was left alone with none to help him, he climbed the nearest tree, tied his neck to a branch, and died like a foreigner. Their deaths were better planned than their lives.

To return to Vavau, from which I have strayed many degrees of longitude. Our ride now lay through the wild rocks, buried in flowering creepers that in 1810

"He was discovered by a party of girls."

were the home of Tutawi the hermit. At the beginning of the disturbances that followed the revolution of 1799, this man, weary of the violence of men and the perfidy of women, left his home secretly to live a solitary life, communing with Nature and the spirits of the haunted Liku. The great war and the siege of Feletoa had raged within a few miles of his hiding-place unheeded by him. page 178Years after his relations had eaten his funeral feast, in the belief that he had perished in one of the numerous night attacks of that perilous time, he was accidentally discovered by a party of girls who had wandered hither in search of scented flowers for garlands, and here the great Finau sought an interview with him and tempted him with the promise of land, slaves, and wives if he would return to the life he had left. But he refused them all and died as he had lived, alone and unheeded of the few who remembered his existence.

At length we stood upon the precipice of the Ana Matangi, or "Cave of the winds." Through a cleft in the rock a narrow path led to a ledge whence the adventurous might climb to the cave's mouth; but the Government had taken alarm at the fatal accidents that had occurred here, and had made it a penal offence to make the attempt. The cave's mouth is the top of a vast subterranean funnel whose base is below the sea-level, so that when the tide is rising the air within is compressed with immense force and rushes out of the hole with a deep vibrating hum, and at ebb-tide is sucked in with a whistling hiss audible many yards away. Four times a-day, for a few minutes when the tide is turning, this cave of the winds is at rest, and at these moments it is safe to enter; but at half-tide any one crossing the mouth is either blown off the ledge or sucked in, unless he have a firm foothold and a clear head.

This was not the only expedition in which Finau shepherded me. Like every tourist who stopped at Vavau before me, I paid a visit to the Hunga submarine cave twice famed by Mariner and Byron. It lies some miles page 179to the seaward of Neiafu up the harbour, and when we reached it a heavy swell was rolling in towards the cliff. I was well prepared for the dive into the mouth by my experiences of the Yasawa-i-lau cave in Fiji, but my followers were obdurate, declaring that no one would attempt the Hunga in a westerly swell unless he was resolved on self-destruction. They cited the case of the captain of a ship of war, who was driven upwards by an incoming wave as he was in mid-passage, and who escaped indeed with life, but with his spine so lacerated by the sharp stalactites that he was permanently crippled. While we were still debating the question a smart sailing-boat bore down on us with a stout figure at the tiller, whom I recognised as Finau. He hailed us to say that he had come to pilot us to the other show-cave of the place, and (parenthetically, of course) to point out the boundaries of some land of which it was proposed illegally to deprive him. The cave just allowed our boats to run in with masts standing. Inside it heightened and broadened to a width of 60 or 70 feet. The limestone walls were disfigured with the names of Europeans and Tongans, and the dates of their offence; for, with the art of writing, has come the Cockney instinct to deface Nature with a record of existences to which she and all her creatures are supremely indifferent.

The stock entertainment of the place was a shaft of rock which, when struck with the handle of an oar, gave out a deep musical note. But Finau had something more serious in view than this puerile amusement. Leaving our boats, we clambered over the rocks through a dark passage and emerged into another cave, in size and shape page 180like the interior of a large lime-kiln, even to the hole in the conical roof. Acting under Finau's orders, one of our men now swam back to the entrance of the cave, and a

"Sending up a thick column of smoke to the leafy chimney."

few minutes later a shout from the dome warned us to "stand from under." Through the chimney-hole invisible hands showered down great billets of firewood. Matches page 181were produced, and in a few moments a large fire was heating the stones in the middle of the cave's floor, and sending up a thick column of smoke to the leafy chimney in the roof. When the stones were red-hot and the oven was ready for its lining, the same invisible hand, in obedience to Finau's shout, poured through the hole a shower of green branches and banana-leaves, that fluttered down like the ruins of Klingsor's garden. The chickens and yams were soon baking in the steam of the leaves, buried under a foot of soil. Picnics such as this are to the idle young Tongan one of the highest forms of earthly happiness.

Fonos and addresses to the Civil servants had done something towards allaying suspicion and discontent in Vavau, in spite of the strenuous efforts of Mr Baker's son and the other Europeans to foster hostility to the Government. The result of the Governor's misconduct in accepting coin in payment of taxes had been to pour into the empty local treasury between £2000 and £3000 in silver. Seeing that the cow-faced sub-treasurer, in addition to his other delinquencies, reported that £6 had miraculously vanished from a saucer in which he guarded the public funds, though the fastenings of the treasury were intact, it was plainly time to remove the whole sum to a place where it could be employed in liquidating the debts of the country rather than those of the local officials. There was a strange display of emotion among the treasury clerks when I announced my intention. The Customs officer, an Englishman, enlightened me. The nobles of Vavau were Home Eulers to a man, at least in so far as their money was concerned. They held that every dollar-page 182piece paid into their treasury should be spent in their island—the very self-same coins, not changelings from Tongatabu. Therefore, though the law enjoined them, on receipt of instructions from the Minister of Finance, to remit their money to Nukualofa, even in the zenith of Mr Baker's power they habitually disregarded such orders, until the Premier himself, accompanied by a Cabinet Minister or two, had to come and remove the money under escort, amid the outspoken murmurs of the whole island As soon as the clerks had spread the news of my intention, all sorts of obstacles sprang into existence. There were no bags to put the money in! It could not be counted in time! It was safer in Vavau than in Nukualofa! The king did not wish the money to go! The king's sanction was not in the least necessary; but as I always preferred to take the least thorny path to my object, I called upon his Majesty to ask his permission, as well as to obtain the royal pardon for Tevita Finau, one of the religious exilas who still lay under sentence of penal servitude for church offences. I found the king in the back verandah of the tumble-down Palace, apparently alone; but a glance at the rickety kitchen, that stood within earshot, told me that the building was packed with the gossips of Vavau assembled to take notes of our interview.

"Is not this a time for forgiveness?" the king said, in reply to my formal request for a pardon for Finau. "Sign the papers in my name." To my second demand he said, "Let them talk. Take the money. Is not Vavau the land of foolish talking?"

But I wanted more than this. Manase had to learn a page 183lesson, and I asked for a Privy Council for the ostensible purpose of passing a short Ordinance of routine. To make the necessary quorum, I suggested that Inoke Fotu, the judge, Kubu's father, should be sworn in as an extraordinary member. Though a professed adherent of our party, he had shown signs of independence under the suspension of his relative and protégé, the cow-faced subtreasurer, and I thought that the appointment, besides flattering him, would force him to declare against his old adversary Manase. The king was in an executive mood. "Haû ha taha!" (Let some one come!) he cried.

From among the trees in the distance a burly Tongan burst at a quick run. Gathering speed as he approached, when at ten yards from the king he leaped suddenly into the air and landed in a sitting posture right at the king's feet, with head bowed and body rigid in the attitude of respect. It was the most physically painful act of reverence I had ever witnessed.

"Tell Inoke and Manase to come at once."

The man sprang to his feet and dashed off into the trees at his topmost speed. In a few moments the two chiefs arrived, evidently perturbed at the urgency of the summons. We moved into the dining-room, and held our Council there and then. Manase's feeble protest against the first resolution, that the funds in the treasury should be remitted to Nukualofa according to law, was unheeded by the king, but it sufficed to rouse old Inoke, and the resolution was of course carried.

Armed with so formidable a mandate as an Order of the king in Council, I summoned all the treasury officials to count the cash, and ordered canvas bags to be made at page 184the nearest store. There is no dirtier or more wearisome task than that of counting £2000 or £3000 in silver, especially in a country where coins are grimy with handling, and one is distracted with the necessity of watching that the subordinates do not levy a toll upon their task. The bags were scarcely sealed when the steamer came in. An escort of sulky police was requisitioned; and I superintended an unwilling train of moneycarriers down the hill to the wharf, and heard the muttered reproaches of the bystanders, who believed themselves to be again defrauded of their hard-earned treasure by their rivals of the capital.