retends 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 by old-fashioned, far-away European
names, just as if you were to call the cellar stair and the corner of
the next street--if you could only manage to pronounce the 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 pockets 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 there 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 boys and girls in your part of
the town might feel very much inclined to give him a penny in charity.
So you see that a very, 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, an