ing a fine road around the
island and another across it, with bridges and culverts, where he used
to ride of a sundown in a buggy he had bought off Captain Sachs of the
_H. L. Tiernan_, with men tugging him instead of horses, and the Native
Constabulary trotting along in the rear like a Royal Progress.

He built a fine-appearing wharf, too, and an improved jail with a cement
floor, and heaven help anybody who threw fish-guts on the shore or
didn't keep his land as clean as a new pin. There was a public well made
in the middle of the settlement, with cement steps and a white-painted
fence to keep away the pigs, and the natives, though they hated to work,
were proud, too, of what they had done, and I doubt if they had ever
been so prosperous or freer of sickness. I know Stanley and I doubled
our trade, in spite of having to take out heavy licenses, which meant
that not only we, but everybody else were that much better off. Petty
thieving disappeared entirely, and likewise all violence, and one of the
Commissioner's best reforms was a land court where titles were
established and boundaries marked out, that stopping the only thing the
Kanakas ever seriously quarreled about. Six months of the Commissioner
had revolutionized the island, and few would have cared to go back to
the old loose days when your only Supreme Court was the rifle hanging on
your wall.

Well, it grew nearer and nearer for the _Evangel of Hope_ to arrive, and
Mr. Clemm he began to do a most extraordinary thing, which was nothing
else than a large cemetery! Yes, sir, that's what Mr. Clemm did, tearing
down five or six houses for the purpose on the lagoon side, nigh the
wharf, and planting rows on rows of white headstones, with low mounds
at each, representing graves. There must have been a couple of hundred
of them, and often it was a whitewashed cross instead of a stone or
maybe a pointed stake--the whole giving the impression of a calamity
that had suddenly overtaken us.

It was no good asking him what it was for; the Commissioner wasn't a man
to be questioned when he didn't want to be; all he said was that Stanley
and I were to stick inside our stores when the ship came and not budge
an inch till we were told. With us orders were orders, but the Kanakas
were panicky with terror, and that cemetery with nobody in it seemed to
them like tempting Providence. It took all of Mr. Clemm's authority to
keep them quiet, and it got out that the Commissioner was