-tree _al fresco_. Yet we
were already well enough acquainted in the Gilberts to recognise it, at
the first sight, for a piece of wizardry, or, as they say in the group,
of Devil-work.

The plaited palms were what we recognised. We had seen them before on
Apaiang, the most christianised of all these islands; where excellent
Mr. Bingham lived and laboured and has left golden memories; whence all
the education in the northern Gilberts traces its descent; and where we
were boarded by little native Sunday-school misses in clean frocks, with
demure faces, and singing hymns as to the manner born.

Our experience of Devil-work at Apaiang had been as follows:--It chanced
we were benighted at the house of Captain Tierney. My wife and I lodged
with a Chinaman some half a mile away; and thither Captain Reid and a
native boy escorted us by torchlight. On the way the torch went out, and
we took shelter in a small and lonely Christian chapel to rekindle it.
Stuck in the rafters of the chapel was a branch of knotted palm. "What is
that?" I asked. "O, that's Devil-work," said the Captain. "And what is
Devil-work?" I inquired. "If you like, I'll show you some when we get to
Johnnie's," he replied. "Johnnie's" was a quaint little house upon the
crest of the beach, raised some three feet on posts, approached by stairs;
part walled, part trellised. Trophies of advertisement-photographs were
hung up within for decoration. There was a table and a recess-bed, in
which Mrs. Stevenson slept; while I camped on the matted floor with
Johnnie, Mrs. Johnnie, her sister, and the devil's own regiment of
cockroaches. Hither was summoned an old witch, who looked the part to
horror. The lamp was set on the floor; the crone squatted on the
threshold, a green palm-branch in her hand, the light striking full on her
aged features and picking out behind her, from the black night, timorous
faces of spectators. Our sorceress began with a chanted incantation; it
was in the old tongue, for which I had no interpreter; but ever and again
there ran along the crowd outside that laugh which every traveller in the
islands learns so soon to recognise,--the laugh of terror. Doubtless these
half-Christian folk were shocked, these half-heathen folk alarmed. Chench
or Taburik thus invoked, we put our questions; the witch knotted the
leaves, here a leaf and there a leaf, plainly on some arithmetical system;
studied the result with great apparent contention of mind; and gave