rldly reasons to the darkness." In other words,
Banderah, although by no means averse to the poorer natives of the
island adopting Christianity in a very free and modified form, and
contributing a certain amount of their possessions to the missionary
cause, was yet a heathen, and intended to remain one. For Mr. Deighton
he had conceived a personal liking, mingled with a wondering and
contemptuous pity. During an intertribal war he had received a bullet in
his thigh, which the missionary had succeeded, after much difficulty, in
extracting. Consequently, his gratitude was unlimited, and he evinced it
in a very practical manner, by commanding some hundreds of his subjects
to become Christians under pain of death. And, being aware that polygamy
would not be tolerated by Mr. Deighton, he went a step further, and
ordered all those of these forced converts who had more than one wife
to send them to his own harem. This addition to his family duties,
was, however, amply compensated for by the labour of the surplus wives
proving useful to him on his yam and taro plantations.

In his younger days Banderah had once made a voyage to Sydney, in the
service of a trading captain, one Lannigan, whose name, in those days,
was a name to conjure with from one end of Melanesia to the other, and
for whose valour as a fighter and killer of men Banderah had acquired
a respect he could never entertain for a missionary. This captain,
however, died in Sydney, full of years and strong drink, and left the
chief almost broken-hearted, to return a year later to Mayou.

In his curious, semi-savage character there were some good points, and
one was that in compliance with the oft-expressed wishes and earnest
entreaties of Blount and Mr. Deighton, he had agreed to put down the
last remnants of cannibalism which had lingered among the coast tribes
on the island down to the time of this story. And although the older
men, and some of the priests of the heathen faith, had struggled against
his drastic legislation, they finally gave in when Mr. Deighton, weeping
tears of honest joy at such a marvellous and wholesale conversion,
presented each convert with a new print shirt and a highly coloured
picture of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

An hour after Blount had walked along the beach to Lak-a-lak, Banderah
saw the captain of the schooner come ashore and walk up the path to
Nathaniel Burrowes' house, where he was warmly greeted by Burrowes and
the Ger