r has the call of the cadets. She would be
arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented, garlanded, decked
with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her friends supposed;
for death, as she well knew. "Tell me the man's name, and I will spare
you," said Nakaeia. But the girl was staunch; she held her peace, saved
her lover; and the queens strangled her between the mats.

Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated. Deeds that
smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice;
his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall with respect the
firmness of his government; and even the whites, whom he long opposed
and kept at arm's-length, give him the name (in the canonical South Sea
phrase) of "a perfect gentleman when sober."

When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his
next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal policy, and
warned him he was too weak to reign. The warning was taken to heart, and
for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia's. Nanteitei
dispensed with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a
leather mail-bag. To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence;
you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike
remained unanswered. The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them
heiresses; for the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a
chief means of buttressing the throne. Nakaeia kept his harem busy for
himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others. In his days, for instance,
Messrs. Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the
town. The masonry was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and
waded there like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing
durst not begin till they had finished, lest by chance he should look
down and see them.

It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang. For some time
already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari--Maka and
Kanoa, two brave child-like men. Nakaeia would none of their doctrine;
he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some
affection for their persons. In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he
slew with his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching on their backs
to knife them, and menacing the missionary if he interfered; yet he not
only spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had
fled) with some expressi