ight have found the means to be present; perhaps
my doubts revived; and before I got home they were transformed to
certainties. Tom, the bar-keeper of the "Sans Souci," was in
conversation with two emissaries from the court. The "keen," they said,
wanted "din," failing which "perandi."[7] No din, was Tom's reply, and
no perandi; but "pira" if they pleased. It seems they had no use for
beer, and departed sorrowing.

"Why, what is the meaning of all this?" I asked. "Is the island on the
spree?"

Such was the fact. On the 4th of July a feast had been made, and the
king, at the suggestion of the whites, had raised the tapu against
liquor. There is a proverb about horses; it scarce applies to the
superior animal, of whom it may be rather said, that any one can start
him drinking, not any twenty can prevail on him to stop. The tapu,
raised ten days before, was not yet re-imposed; for ten days the town
had been passing the bottle or lying (as we had seen it the afternoon
before) in hoggish sleep; and the king, moved by the Old Men and his own
appetites, continued to maintain the liberty, to squander his savings on
liquor, and to join in and lead the debauch. The whites were the authors
of this crisis; it was upon their own proposal that the freedom had been
granted at the first; and for a while, in the interests of trade, they
were doubtless pleased it should continue. That pleasure had now
sometime ceased; the bout had been prolonged (it was conceded) unduly;
and it now began to be a question how it might conclude. Hence Tom's
refusal. Yet that refusal was avowedly only for the moment, and it was
avowedly unavailing; the king's foragers, denied by Tom at the "Sans
Souci," would be supplied at "The Land we Live in" by the gobbling Mr.
Williams.

The degree of the peril was not easy to measure at the time, and I am
inclined to think now it was easy to exaggerate. Yet the conduct of
drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and at home our
populations are not armed from the highest to the lowest with revolvers
and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a debauch by the whole
townful--and I might rather say, by the whole polity--king, magistrates,
police, and army joining in one common scene of drunkenness. It must be
thought besides that we were here in barbarous islands, rarely visited,
lately and partly civilised. First and last, a really considerable
number of whites have perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through