nothing of hundreds of small ones. Here and there on
the coasts, living by most precarious tenure, was a sprinkling of
missionaries, traders, beche-de-mer fishers, and whaleship deserters.
The smoke of the hot ovens arose under their windows, and the bodies of
the slain were dragged by their doors on the way to the feasting.

The Lotu, or the Worship, was progressing slowly, and, often, in
crablike fashion. Chiefs, who announced themselves Christians and
were welcomed into the body of the chapel, had a distressing habit of
backsliding in order to partake of the flesh of some favorite enemy. Eat
or be eaten had been the law of the land; and eat or be eaten promised
to remain the law of the land for a long time to come. There were
chiefs, such as Tanoa, Tuiveikoso, and Tuikilakila, who had literally
eaten hundreds of their fellow men. But among these gluttons Ra
Undreundre ranked highest. Ra Undreundre lived at Takiraki. He kept a
register of his gustatory exploits. A row of stones outside his house
marked the bodies he had eaten. This row was two hundred and thirty
paces long, and the stones in it numbered eight hundred and seventy-two.
Each stone represented a body. The row of stones might have been longer,
had not Ra Undreundre unfortunately received a spear in the small of his
back in a bush skirmish on Somo Somo and been served up on the table of
Naungavuli, whose mediocre string of stones numbered only forty-eight.

The hard-worked, fever-stricken missionaries stuck doggedly to their
task, at times despairing, and looking forward for some special
manifestation, some outburst of Pentecostal fire that would bring a
glorious harvest of souls. But cannibal Fiji had remained obdurate. The
frizzle-headed man-eaters were loath to leave their fleshpots so long as
the harvest of human carcases was plentiful. Sometimes, when the harvest
was too plentiful, they imposed on the missionaries by letting the word
slip out that on such a day there would be a killing and a barbecue.
Promptly the missionaries would buy the lives of the victims with stick
tobacco, fathoms of calico, and quarts of trade beads. Natheless the
chiefs drove a handsome trade in thus disposing of their surplus live
meat. Also, they could always go out and catch more.

It was at this juncture that John Starhurst proclaimed that he would
carry the Gospel from coast to coast of the Great Land, and that he
would begin by penetrating the mountain fastnesses of t