hty in the
South Seas. The days had not come in which steamers with brass-bound
supercargoes, carrying tin boxes and taking orders like merchants'
bagmen, for goods "to arrive," exploited the Ellice, Kingsmill, and
Gilbert Groups. Bluff-bowed old wave-punchers like the SPEC, the LADY
ALICIA and the E. K. BATESON plunged their clumsy hulls into the
rolling swell of the mid-Pacific, carrying their "trade" of knives,
axes, guns, bad rum, and good tobacco, instead of, as now, white
umbrellas, paper boots and shoes, German sewing-machines and fancy
prints--"zephyrs," the smartly-dressed paper-collared supercargo of
to-day calls them, as he submits a card of patterns to Emilia, the
native teacher's wife, who, as the greatest Lady in the Land, must have
first choice.

* * * * *

In those days the sleek native missionary was an unknown quantity in
the Tokelaus and Kingsmills, and the local white trader answered all
requirements. He was generally a rough character--a runaway from some
Australian or American whaler, or a wandering Ishmael, who, for reasons
of his own, preferred living among the intractable, bawling, and
poverty-stricken people of the equatorial Pacific to dreaming away his
days in the monotonously happy valleys of the Society and Marquesas
Groups.

* * * * *

Such a man was Probyn, who dwelt on one of the low atolls of the Ellice
Islands. He had landed there one day from a Sydney sperm whaler with a
chest of clothes, a musket or two, and a tierce of twist tobacco; with
him came a savage-eyed, fierce-looking native wife, over whose bared
shoulders and bosom fell long waves of black hair; with her was a child
about five years old.

The second mate of the whaler, who was in charge of the boat, not
liking the looks of the excited natives who swarmed around the
newcomer, bade him a hurried farewell, and pushed away to the ship,
which lay-to off the passage with her fore-yard aback. Then the
clamorous people pressed more closely around Probyn and his wife, and
assailed them with questions.

So far neither of them had spoken. Probyn, a tall, wiry, scanty-haired
man, with quiet, deep-set eyes, was standing with one foot on the
tierce of tobacco and his hands in his pockets. His wife glared
defiantly at some two or three score of reddish-brown women who crowded
eagerly around her to stare into her face; holding to the sleeve of her
dress was the child, paralysed into the silence of fright.

* * * * *

The dea