pretends that the strange great
trees with their broad leaves and slab-sided roots are European oaks;
and the places on the road up (where you and I and the little girls in
the cellar have already gone) he calls old-fashioned, far-away European
names, just as if you were to call the cellar-stairs and the corner of
the next street--if you could only manage to pronounce their
names--Upolu and Savaii. And so it is with all of us, with Austin, and
the lean man, and the little girls in the cellar; wherever we are, it is
but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however
well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall
be different.

But you must not suppose that Austin does nothing but build forts, and
walk among the woods, and swim in the rivers. On the contrary, he is
sometimes a very busy and useful fellow; and I think the little girls in
the cellar would have admired him very nearly as much as he admired
himself, if they had seen him setting off on horseback, with his hand on
his hip, and his pocket full of letters and orders, at the head of quite
a procession of huge white cart-horses with pack-saddles, and big, brown
native men with nothing on but gaudy kilts. Mighty well he managed all
his commissions; and those who saw him ordering and eating his
single-handed luncheon in the queer little Chinese restaurant on the
beach, declare he looked as if the place, and the town, and the whole
archipelago belonged to him.

But I am not going to let you suppose that this great gentleman at the
head of all his horses and his men, like the king of France in the old
rhyme, would be thought much of a dandy on the streets of London. On the
contrary, if he could be seen with his dirty white cap and his faded
purple shirt, and his little brown breeks that do not reach his knees,
and the bare shanks below, and the bare feet stuck in the
stirrup-leathers--for he is not quite long enough to reach the irons--I
am afraid the little girls and boys in your part of the town might be
very much inclined to give him a penny in charity. So you see that a
very big man in one place might seem very small potatoes in another,
just as the king's palace here (of which I told you in my last) would be
thought rather a poor place of residence by a Surrey gipsy. And if you
come to that, even the lean man himself, who is no end of an important
person, if he were picked up from the chair where he is now sitting, and