ladies, that I cannot promise you any shortening
of your time of banishment. His majesty has received your complaint,
and has caused due investigation to be made; and the result of that
investigation has not led him to make any relaxation in your case. For
it has been clearly ascertained that the good works and charitable deeds
of which you informed me on my last visit, consisted in your attending
to work to which you were not called, to the neglect of duties which
plainly belonged to you; and that for any seeming sacrifice you made in
the bestowal of your time and labour, you more than repaid yourselves in
the applause which you managed to obtain from a troop of ignorant or
interested admirers. It would, in fact, appear that your benevolence
and labour for others involved no real self-denial in it, but was only,
after all, another but less obvious form of selfishness. His majesty
admires and respects nothing more than genuine co-operation in working
for the benefit of the suffering and the needy; but in your case this
stamp of genuineness is found to be wanting. We trust, however, that
your present work may prove to be of a better character, and that at the
expiry of your exile you will return home prepared to do good from truly
pure and unselfish motives."

Murmurs followed, as they had accompanied, this speech, but the
commissioner was inexorable.

And now at last the six months had come to an end, and the exiles of
Comoro flocked to the steamers which were to convey them back to the
mainland. The discipline had been with most very salutary. Roughing it
for the first time in their lives had been the means with many of
smoothing out the wrinkles of grosser selfishness from their characters.
Others had learned to look at things through their neighbours' eyes,
and thus had come to think less about themselves and about consulting
their own pleasure merely. Some also who had moved up and down in a
groove all their previous lives, and had made all about them miserable
or uncomfortable by their unbending and ungracious habits, had learned
the wisdom, and happiness, too, of bending aside a little from the path
of their own prejudices to accommodate a neighbour. Many likewise,
having been forced to do things of which, on their first landing on
Comoro, they had loudly proclaimed themselves physically incapable, now
found, to no one's surprise so much as their own, that their former
impossibilities could henceforth be