that we know you
have been ill, please do let some one send us a line to our next address
telling us how you are. What that next address may be we do not yet
know, as our final movements are a little uncertain. To begin with, a
trading schooner, the _Equator_, will come along some time in the first
part of June, lie outside the harbour here and signal to us. Within
forty-eight hours we shall pack up our possessions, our barrel of sauer
kraut, our barrel of salt onions, our bag of cocoanuts, our native
garments, our tobacco, fish hooks, red combs, and Turkey red calicoes
(all the latter for trading purposes), our hand organ, photograph and
painting materials, and finally our magic lantern--all these upon a
large whaleboat, and go out to the _Equator_. Lloyd, also, takes a
fiddle, a guitar, a native instrument something like a banjo, called a
taropatch fiddle, and a lot of song books. We shall be carried first to
one of the Gilberts, landing at Butaritari. The _Equator_ is going about
amongst the Gilbert group, and we have the right to keep her over when
we like within reasonable limits. Finally she will leave us, and we
shall have to take the chances of what happens next. We hope to see the
Marshalls, the Carolines, the Fijis, Tonga and Samoa (also other islands
that I do not remember), perhaps staying a little while in Sydney, and
stopping on our way home to see our friends in Tahiti and the Marquesas.
I am very much exercised by one thing. Louis has the most enchanting
material that any one ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am
afraid he is going to spoil it all. He has taken into his Scotch
Stevenson head that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must
be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing, comparing the
different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the
different peoples, the object being to settle the question as to whether
they are of common Malay origin or not. Also to compare the Protestant
and Catholic missions, etc., and the whole thing to be impersonal,
leaving out all he knows of the people themselves. And I believe there
is no one living who has got so near to them, or who understands them as
he does. Think of a small treatise on the Polynesian races being offered
to people who are dying to hear about Ori a Ori, the making of brothers
with cannibals, the strange stories they told, and the extraordinary
adventures that befell us:--suppose Herman Melville had