n
or pistol slung about his neck. "Where are you going?" asked the chief.
"The king called us," they would reply. "Here is your place. Sit down,"
returned the chief. With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and
sufficient force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia
was summoned and surrendered. About this period, in almost every part of
the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the
last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to
ambition. Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style
were spared to him, but he was stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a
festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never
enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of
Nakaeia, and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the
service of a troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in
debt.

He died some months before my arrival in the islands, and no one
regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor. This was by
repute the hero of the family. Alone of the four brothers, he had issue,
a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in
the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help;
and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.
Nantemat', _Mr. Corpse_, was his appalling nickname, and he had earned
it well. Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded
houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered
families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia _redux_. He came,
summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he
proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and
the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the
name of Tebureimoa.

The change in the man's character was much commented on in the island,
and variously explained by opium and Christianity. To my eyes, there
seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency. Mr. Corpse was
afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men. Terror
of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second
disables him for the least act of government. He played his part of
bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering
others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a
reader of the Bible, perhaps