The motive for this act was
inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were thus economised,
would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners. And the
act itself was simply murder. Tari's life must have hung in the
beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror of that time, it is not
unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which he was still liable; or
perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and ordained him to be
spared. He escaped at least alive, married in the island, and when I
knew him was a widower with a married son and a granddaughter. But the
thought of Oahu haunted him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he
beheld it, looking back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and
dance; and in his dreams I dare say he revisits it with joy. I wonder
what he would think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the
modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its
guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms
and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown
faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land sold for
planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the
last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs
on Molokai? So simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so sadly, the
changes come.

Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run up
by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the
shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its
contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron sauce-pan, several
cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil;
while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the
open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for
me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink,
and carried me up the den "to see my house"--the only entertainment that
he had to offer. He liked the "Amelican," he said, and the "Inglisman,"
but the "Flessman" was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain
that if he had thought us "Fless," we should have had none of his nuts,
and never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can partly
understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-Saxon. The next
day he brought me a pig, and some days later one of our party going
ashore found him in act to bring a seco