_. We have been about a month ashore, camping
out in a kind of town the king set up for us: on the idea that I was
really a "big chief" in England. He dines with us sometimes, and sends
up a cook for a share of our meals when he does not come himself. This
sounds like high living! alas, undeceive yourself. Salt junk is the
mainstay; a low island, except for cocoanuts, is just the same as a ship
at sea: brackish water, no supplies, and very little shelter. The king
is a great character--a thorough tyrant, very much of a gentleman, a
poet, a musician, a historian, or perhaps rather more a genealogist--it
is strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal
wives) writing the History of Apemama in an account-book; his
description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as
"about sweethearts, and trees, and the sea--and no true, all-the-same
lie," seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man
could ask. Tembinoka is here the great attraction: all the rest is heat
and tedium and villainous dazzle, and yet more villainous mosquitoes. We
are like to be here, however, many a long week before we get away, and
then whither? A strange trade this voyaging: so vague, so bound-down, so
helpless. Fanny has been planting some vegetables, and we have actually
onions and radishes coming up: ah, onion-despiser, were you but a while
in a low island, how your heart would leap at sight of a coster's
barrow! I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips. No doubt we
shall all be glad to say farewell to low islands--I had near said for
ever. They are very tame; and I begin to read up the directory, and pine
for an island with a profile, a running brook, or were it only a well
among the rocks. The thought of a mango came to me early this morning
and set my greed on edge; but you do not know what a mango is, so----.

I have been thinking a great deal of you and the Monument of late, and
even tried to get my thoughts into a poem, hitherto without success. God
knows how you are: I begin to weary dreadfully to see you--well, in nine
months, I hope; but that seems a long time. I wonder what has befallen
me too, that flimsy part of me that lives (or dwindles) in the public
mind; and what has befallen _The Master_, and what kind of a Box the
Merry Box has been found. It is odd to know nothing of all this. We had
an old woman to do devil-work for you about a month ago, in a Chinaman's
house on Apaia