ed women, but their light skins were stained
and disfigured by the application of turmeric. At one of these places
our pretty tormentors played us a trick. While we were in a house and
having kava prepared in the Micronesian fashion, by pounding the green
root into a hollowed stone, the girls carried our canoe up bodily from
the beach and hid it in a clump of breadfruit trees about two hundred
yards away. When we bade goodbye to the elder women, who had given us
the kava, and walked down to the beach the canoe was gone.

"Here, you girls," said Nana, "where is our canoe? Don't play these
foolish tricks; the white man must get to Leasse before darkness sets
in."

But the imps only laughed at us, and for some minutes we had a great
game with them, chasing them about. At last we tired of this, and,
lighting our pipes, sat down to smoke under a great banyan, whose
branches reached far out over the white beaches. One of the children,
a merry-eyed girl of ten, with long hair that almost touched her knees,
was a bit of a humorist, and told us that we might as well stay for the
night, as the canoe was gone for ever.

"Where to?" we asked.

"Up there," she answered, with the gravest countenance imaginable,
pointing skyward. "A big kanapu (fish eagle) was soaring overhead, and
suddenly swooped down and seized it in his claws and flew away into the
blue with it."

At last, however, they came back, carrying the canoe among them, and
with much laughter dropped it into the water. Then they filled it with
as many young drinking coco-nuts and as much fruit as we could stow,
and bade us farewell, running along the beach with us till a high, steep
bluff shut them off from following us any further.

By and by, as we paddled along, the sun began to get pretty hot, and we
kept in as close as possible under the shade of the steep shores of the
mainland. Overhead was a sky of matchless, cloudless blue, and sailing
to and fro on motionless wing were numbers of tropic birds, their long
scarlet retrices showing in startling contrast to their snow-white body
plumage. All round about us turtle would rise every now and then, and
taking a look at us, sink out of sight again. From the dense mountain
forest, that earlier in the morning had resounded with the heavy booming
note of the great grey pigeons and the cooing note of the little purple
doves, not a sound now came forth, for the birds were roosting in the
shade from the heat of the sun. H