He says that he then beheld a little skinny, bare, black boy, crowned with a thick fuzzy head of hair, like a besom standing on its handle; that my eyes and teeth were so white and bright as to be the envy of the white world. And finally, that about this little ebony figure there was an air of shyness, and a tendency to "sulks," which, to use his own words written home long ago, "the liveliest imagination cannot realize, or the freest fiction exaggerate."

I know from reading English Lives of Men, that it is proper to begin with the date of birth: but in my case it is impossible to do so, as no such record was kept at that time, when reading and writing and days of the week were all unknown to us. The moonth, or month, was the smallest division of time we had, and ten moons made one year. For them we had names,

but for the days none whatever.

The date, then, of the great event of the birth of the little brown struggling mortal they called Pomo, after a bloodthirsty ancestor of ours, whom we worshipped after his death, is, among many other interesting things, hidden in the thick mists of the past. But, after consultation with those who have known me from my boyhood, I have come to the conclusion that my age at the present time must be between five-and-thirty and forty.

And yet it seems but the other day that I was a little wild heathen boy, who had never seen or heard of such a thing as a white man.

I must now say something of the kind of world I was born into.

CHAPTER II.

MY HOME.

My home is the beautiful green island of Pombuana, in the blue Pacific, and please pronounce it Pome-boo-anah, for I do not like to hear our musical words crunched like so much biscuit

A POMBUANA INTERIOR.

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between jaws accustomed to crush hard morsels of your own jagged talk. My own jaws ache at the thought of it. I declare that some of your words are only fit to drive chickens out of the house with!

Pombuana is not a large island; it is in fact three islets, separated by very narrow river-like straits, running between high forest-clad hills, whence tiny houses perched on stilts keep watch upon the treacherous waters. The three islets are Bokona, Uri, and Matambala.

I was born in Matambala, at Rota-in-the-Middle, a village on the hill-tops, sheltering among clumps of cocoa-nut trees, a sure sign, with us, of human habitation.

In English you have the expression, "Come under my roof; and that is a form of invitation fit for every Pombuana host, for our houses consist of a roof and nothing else.

One gable of my father's roof rested upon the edge of the level space, which did duty for "Market-place" in our Rota; and the other gable over-hung a precipice, and looked out over the wavy ridges of the forest, rising and falling, until they dipped their ponderous branches in the blue waters of the still lagoon.

In order to get under my father's roof you must squeeze yourself through a door-hole about two-feet-and-a-half high, by one-foot-and-a-half wide, which can be shut with a sliding shutter of stoutly woven bamboo and cane; and then, if you do not stick in the door-way, you find yourself in smoke and darkness; for we did not have chimneys, because the smoke is useful for killing insects and for strengthening the bamboo rafters.

If you are not very careful where you tread, you will walk upon my relations, who people the darkness and cover the bamboo floor; or what will be worse, for you at least, your feet may wander among the hot ashes on the square earth or hearth, in the middle of the inflammable floor.

My father's name was Marévo, and my mother's Siama.

Marévo was a tall thin man, with head clean-shaven, except a little curly mat on the top. The ear-ring holes in his ears were so large that, one day (many years later than the days I am now telling you about) he asked me to beg an empty collar box for him from my white friends. And what do you think he did with it? Why, he knocked the bottom out of it, and took the top out of the lid, and then filled out the loose skin of one ear with the box, and of the other with the cover (No. 15, too!) the skin of the ear going round the box on one side of his head, and the lid on the other, like a pair of elastic bands. When he had nothing in them, the two loops of the skin dangled upon his shoulders; but when he had them filled out round and open on both sides of his head, you could see the opposite mountains, trees, and houses through them, as if you were looking through a double spyglass, or the handles of a gigantic pair of scissors.

My mother, Siama, was a very fine looking woman. Her face was elegantly tattooed; not deeply, nor with dark juice as the faces of the New Zealanders are; but only skin deep, and with a very pretty pattern: just as if you saw her brown plump cheeks through the border of a veil. She was a good woman, and a faithful wife, and brought me up in a religious way, telling me of my tribe, the Hongokama (we all belong to the tribe of our mother, and not of our father; so that a man's sister's son is often more beloved than his own), and of the Unclean Food or abomination of my tribe, the Pigeon, to eat which, she said, would be the death of me. Thank God, O English child, that you were taught to say "Our Father."

When I was very small my mother slung me in a long cloth behind her, and swung me round in front at meal-times. Sometimes, however, I was quite satisfied with sucking the stem of her little black pipe which dangled, like me, from her neck.

PORTRAIT OF A CHIEF.

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CHAPTER III.

SOME FRIENDS, AND OTHERS.

EACH of the three islets was ruled by one supreme chief, who excelled the other village chiefs in bodily strength, and therefore in wealth and power. But greatest of the three was Malagai of Uri, whose two brothers, Toroa of Matambala, and Salatambu of Bokona, could only shine at a distance. The trio may be briefly described as three necessary nuisances. Toroa, our own particular tyrant, was tall, and had a proud, defiant air, which disguised a heart as cowardly as ever beat within human breast. He was ambitious, noisy, cruel, passionately fond of music, as tender as a mother to his favourite children, and faithful to his word once given, whether to kill or to save alive. But his malice, hatred, and revenge knew no abatement, rendering him the disturber and constant terror of all Pombuana. Of Malagai and his burly brother Salatambu, the least selfish and cruel, but the most warlike of the three, I shall speak hereafter.

My dearest black friend in the world was, and is, Rogani of Rota-in-the-East, as handsome a fellow as ever the wide white world could produce; aye, and as true! His father's name was Roé: his mother-ah, here we touch the grief that checked Rogani's cheeriest laugh. It is enough to say that her conduct had brought sorrow and disgrace upon her family.

Roé became old that very day. In addition to this trouble he was persecuted by Toroa, as David was by Saul, and his life and that of his scattered family became a sore burden, scarcely worth the bearing.

Often of an evening, while Rogani and I, and the other children, were making the air shrill with our cries, the old hunted man would be off to Rota-West, armed with a spear and club

and shield, without which we never slept or ventured forth in those fighting days-off to try and get a puff at a neighbour's pipe, and a chew at a friend's areca nuts and betel-leaves, upon which (not always borrowed, or he would have drawn in and swallowed down all that was smokable and chewable in the whole community), the old man lived. And when at length his companions left the open-air fireside for their own homes, he would seize a flaring firebrand, and begin to jog home, being careful to throw the flickering uncertain light well upon the path, for fear of treading upon fatal ria leaves and other deadly charms. The fitful glare of the brandished fire-stick illuminated not only the path, but Roé's downcast face, and showed it to be stamped with all the care and hopelessness of our religion of dread and death: a face with every smile torn out of it He was in one sense a dead man already; for the only life that he lived, the life of his earthly home, had shrivelled to an empty husk, and all he looked for now was to casting it speedily behind him, and then to lie down flat at ease in death and-rest!

But there was another light already dawning upon him, coming from afar, but sent to him, and coming; sent to that poor old black despairing man in his outlandish home: coming to us all, and bringing with it hope for our dry hearts, a looking upward for our downcast eyes, and life in our dreary deaths : the Hope-I would write it with the power of a trumpet, for it has sounded in my own and in my people's hearts, filling their heights and depths, changing them altogether, yes, and all things besides: night to day, death to life, and, hardest of all, Me, who write this story, from a stubborn, selfish, sulky one, to one who loves, because he has been loved-THE HOPE OF JOYFUL RESURRECTION.

You who cannot remember the day when you did not know of that, nor the day when it first flashed-truth!-through and through you, cannot tell what that hope is to us, to whom, in the dark days I am now telling you about, death was-not