of brawls enough, in which club took the place of rapier, and the bodies of the slain were disposed of in a peculiar way; but that was before the white man and the measles arrived, when Mongondro still made the earth tremble, and before these white lunatics came and made him wrap calico round his loins, and practise incantations with a hymn-book (which were a waste of time, because nobody died of them as they do of the real incantations), and taught him, in outlandish Bauan, that when he was dead he would be made alive again to be burnt, and asked him to give a shilling every now and again to the Great Spirit not to burn him, and then took the shilling away with them. But old Capulet doesn't talk about these things any more, because last year the teacher overheard him telling stories to the young men, and threatened to burn him. up with a flash of lightning if he ever did it again.

Decidedly Verona was not an exciting place to live in; and so long as the yam-crop was good, and the missionary left them alone, and that other white man who came sometimes on a horse, and told them to hoe their roads, life was easy and monotonous.

There

Old Capulet had never heard of a romance. wasn't a word for it in his vocabulary, and so he, at any

rate, may be excused for what he did when Tybalt came and told him what had happened. Why, in Capulet's day, women were not worth more than a whale's tooth, however well they could dig! and as for a girl refusing to marry the man who had paid for her, or being untrue to the man she married-why, the thing was unheard of; or at least, if it ever had happened, the case had always been dealt with in the same way—the club, with sometimes the oven to follow.

So when Tybalt came that evening with the story about Romeo and Juliet his wife-Romeo, a man of the hated Noikoro clan,—it was not surprising that old Capulet repaired to Tybalt's house with his long walking-staff, and, with Tybalt's active co-operation, gave Juliet a rather severe thrashing. Nor did the old women see any more romance in the affair than did Capulet; and from the day when Tybalt's suspicions became certainties, the course of true love ran very roughly indeed. Did poor Juliet don her newest liku, with a fringe nearly ten inches long, to go wood-cutting in the hope of a stolen meeting with her adorer, she was sure to find some old village hag dogging her steps. Did she put on Koroisau's old pinafore to impress Romeo on Sunday with her superior sense of the

decencies, her most sacred feelings were sure to be harrowed in the evening by injurious remarks about her figure, and the folly of old women trying to pass for young girls.

Romeo, poor fellow, fared no better. He was no longer welcome in the village of his adoption. When the yams were boiled he was not even asked to partake of them. Some one trampled his yam-vines in the night, and, last insult of all, Capulet's nephew threw a stone at his pig. He loved Juliet with a great and overwhelming passion. He did not know why. She was not beautiful, though her mouth, it is true, was a triumph of the tattooer's skill; but time had overripened her charms, and the lines of her youthful figure were a trifle blurred and indistinct. Yet Romeo was quite sure in his own mind that nobody had ever loved as he did in the world before, and Juliet returned his passion-at least she said she did.

Life was becoming unbearable for both of them. They could not fly together, for whither could they fly? Romeo had once seen the sea from the mountainpass at Naloto, and he had heard that the water closed in his land all round. He knew well enough that if he fled with her to any village he had heard of, in two

weeks they would be brought back; and as for the bush, the idea of living there alone was not to be thought of for a moment. There was one refuge. He did not know where it was, but he knew the path that led to it, which many another had trod before him. The white men said it was a very pleasant place if you were a missionary, but a very hot and uncomfortable place if you were only a mountaineer. But Romeo didn't believe that. The spirits of the coast natives jumped from the north-west cliffs into the sea, and the wraiths of the old mountain chiefs lived in the thick forest—at least so the old men said; but as no one had ever been there and come back, how could any one know? True, the teacher said that a white man had been there and come back, but then white men eat biscuits and things out of tins, and have other gods, and so they probably go to a different place. For the place Romeo was thinking of, with bitterness gnawing at his savage heart, was Death, and the path that led to it was Langaingai.

Romeo knew all about Langaingai, for had not Gavindi drunk of it last year and died, and those two Naloto girls, who smoked after drinking it to make it doubly sure, and Janeti, Buli Nandrau's daughter,-only her