there was a time, many years ago, when their fathers believed that the kava, growing everywhere wild in the forest, was a deadly poison. But one day a man going to his plantation saw a rat gnawing a kava-root. He waited expecting to see it die, but it ate on greedily, and at last ran off uninjured. Much excited by what he had seen, he hastened to tell the Tui Tonga, taking the gnawed root with him to bear out his statement. The chief listened to him and said, "If the rat gnawed the kava and lived, then surely is the plant not poisonous: perhaps it is even a useful medicine; let us try it." So they took shellknives, and scraped the root, and kneaded it with water, and presented it to the Tui Tonga in a cup. But he, looking at it, said, "Perhaps this fellow lied, and the kava is poison after all: let another drink first, that we may know." And he gave the cup to the matabule on his left hand, bidding him drink, and the chief sat gazing at him to see if he would die; and after a while he called for another cup, and gave it to the matabule on his right hand, saying, “Drink, for perhaps your fellow has a stronger stomach than I, and that which harms him not may kill me." And when both had drunk and were unharmed the Tui Tonga drank the cup, and found it pleasant to the taste, and bade them gather the kava from the forest, and let him drink of it daily. Thus it became the usage of the chief to drink the third cup, after the fashion of that Tui Tonga who made a trial of it on the bodies of his matabules.

When the bowl was empty I whispered to Fatafehi that he should announce me as the bearer of a letter to the king from the High Commissioner. He passed the mes

THE HOUSE OF AN HONEST OFFICIAL.

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sage on to our matabule, who shouted a mangled version of it across the king to the fellow sitting on his Majesty's right hand. This functionary as usual shouted "Koe!" to the sea-birds circling over the reef. My letter was then passed to the king, who laid it down without looking at it.

Meanwhile the second brew was being prepared, and although the formalities were sufficiently relaxed to permit conversation, still the king stared straight before him, speaking to no one, and seeming not to hear the conversation which was carried on at speaking-trumpet pitch out of compliment to his deafness. As soon as the cup had gone round again he rose without any warning, passed behind Fatafehi, and stooping over me, extended three fingers of his right hand in welcome, not from any motive of hauteur, but because the fourth finger had been sacrificed in his old heathen days to the manes of a deceased relative. Then without a word he walked off, carrying rather than leaning on his staff for all his ninety years, and disappeared into the long native house where he was staying. The kava-party at once broke up and went their several ways; and Tukuaho emerged from his humble seat behind the bowl, and led us to a large but ruinous house that had once been the king's palace. This was to be our quarters during our visit. Fatafehi left us. here to go to Government House and attend to his executive duties. A glance at that building-we could see it from our verandah-convinced me that whoever may have squandered the public funds, the Governor of Haapai was as guiltless as the Minister of Finance, whose house I had seen in Nukualofa.

In Government House there were traces of a weatherboard bungalow, but the shingles had long ago rotted away, and been replaced from time to time with odd scraps of galvanised iron, rust-eaten through and through. The verandah posts had fallen, bringing down the roof with them, and the gaps in the flooring were mended with bits of an old canoe. But dilapidated as the house of his Majesty's representative was, it was a mansion in comparison to that of the Minister of Finance in Nukualofa, which seemed only to hold together to clear the character of its owner from any suspicion that an empty treasury might reasonably attach to him.

It now transpired that Tukuaho had in his suite a couple of spies devoted to his interests, whose business was to loaf into the houses of their acquaintances and gauge public opinion. One of them, Peter Vi, would have surpassed even the "Sham Squire" if they had been contemporaries. His fat empty face and rotund person disarmed suspicion; and he had besides an odour of the cloth about him, for his father and grandfather were both reverend pillars of the Free Church. The latter, indeed, was the oldest native minister, and a contemporary of the king. He paid us a visit in a hand-cart soon after we arrived, with a black coat over his vala, and a tall hat, carefully brushed the wrong way, upon his reverend head. The poor old gentleman had lost the use of his lower limbs and of part of his intellect; but he said a prayer over us, and went his way, leaving a vapour of respectability behind him which doubtless served to rehabilitate such disreputable politicians as we were believed to be: for although his son, as a Free Church minister, is dis

THE BLESSING OF THE CHURCH.

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affected to the present Cabinet by profession, old Peter is long past polemics, for all creeds seem much alike when one is ninety, and expecting every day to have one's doubts explained away. Young Peter was only a third clerk in the Treasury at £10 a-year, and bad at arithmetic, and he wanted to be Sub-Inspector of Police at

£25; so, having his way to make in the world, he was a loyal spy. The other was Tukuaho's cousin. He was an ex-convict, and looked his part of spy so well that I suspect that the conversation at once turned upon the weather in any house that he entered; but this did not prevent him from bringing blood-curdling reports of the hostility of the people, drawn probably from hearsay aided by a facile imagination.

Having despatched our spies on secret service, we had

time to examine the three great rooms that formed our quarters. There was a depressing air of decayed grandeur about the worm-eaten furniture and weather-stained floor. A large room at the end became our pantry, and through the reed screen that divided it from the rest of the house came the incessant chatter of a Princess and two ladies from the jail who had been told off to attend to our wants. When not engaged in the menial service of washing dishes, they were drinking kava and retailing the local scandal in an atmosphere reeking with the fumes of sulukas. Lest I should seem to boast of my single experience of eating from the hand of a Princess of the Blood Royal, I hasten to add that Charlotte, the lady in question, was a member of Fatafehi's household, and since we were his guests, it was in accordance with native etiquette that she should take charge of the culinary department. She discharged her task admirably, and rang the changes on fried chicken, fried sucking-pig, with baked cocoa-nuts and raw fish1 for dessert, in the most practised manner.

After luncheon Tukuaho became gloomy. Not a soul had come to greet him, and he was not accustomed to unpopularity. During his last visit, he said, his arm had been tired with shaking hands, and his digestion upset with the quantity of kava he had been obliged to drink with his admirers; but now he saw all his old friends pass the door without looking in. Fat Peter's appearance

1 Raw fish is described by Mariner as a delicacy, and it was provided at my special request. It is cut up into lozenge-shaped pieces, and washed in salt water. When I had overcome the natural repugnance of the idea, I found it rather good. There is no valid reason why raw fish should be nastier than raw oysters, which it much resembles in taste.