e personal friend
of Queen Victoria's; that immediately on my return I should make her a
report upon Butaritari; and that if my house should have been again
invaded by natives, a man-of-war would be despatched to make reprisals.
It was scarce the fact--rather a just and necessary parable of the fact,
corrected for latitude; and it certainly told upon the king. He was much
affected; he had conceived the notion (he said) that I was a man of some
importance, but not dreamed it was as bad as this; and the missionary
house was tapu'd under a fine of fifty dollars.

So much was announced on the return of the deputation; not any more; and
I gathered subsequently that much more had passed. The protection gained
was welcome. It had been the most annoying and not the least alarming
feature of the day before, that our house was periodically filled with
tipsy natives, twenty or thirty at a time, begging drink, fingering our
goods, hard to be dislodged, awkward to quarrel with. Queen Victoria's
friend (who was soon promoted to be her son) was free from these
intrusions. Not only my house, but my neighbourhood as well, was left in
peace; even on our walks abroad we were guarded and prepared for; and,
like great persons visiting a hospital, saw only the fair side. For the
matter of a week we were thus suffered to go out and in and live in a
fool's paradise, supposing the king to have kept his word, the tapu to
be revived, and the island once more sober.

_Tuesday, July 23_.--We dined under a bare trellis erected for the
Fourth of July; and here we used to linger by lamplight over coffee and
tobacco. In that climate evening approaches without sensible chill; the
wind dies out before sunset; heaven glows a while and fades, and darkens
into the blueness of the tropical night; swiftly and insensibly the
shadows thicken, the stars multiply their number; you look around you
and the day is gone. It was then that we would see our Chinaman draw
near across the compound in a lurching sphere of light, divided by his
shadows; and with the coming of the lamp the night closed about the
table. The faces of the company, the spars of the trellis, stood out
suddenly bright on a ground of blue and silver, faintly designed with
palm-tops and the peaked roofs of houses. Here and there the gloss upon
a leaf, or the fracture of a stone, returned an isolated sparkle. All
else had vanished. We hung there, illuminated like a galaxy of stars _in
vacuo_; we sat