sors of
Mariki and Tapituea. Yet those whom he so trusts are all women, and all
rivals.

There is indeed a ministry and staff of males: cook, steward, carpenter,
and supercargoes: the hierarchy of a schooner. The spies, "his majesty's
daily papers," as we called them, come every morning to report, and go
again. The cook and steward are concerned with the table only. The
supercargoes, whose business it is to keep tally of the copra at three
pounds a month and a percentage, are rarely in the palace; and two at
least are in the other islands. The carpenter, indeed, shrewd and jolly
old Rubam--query, Reuben?--promoted on my last visit to the greater
dignity of governor, is daily present, altering, extending,
embellishing, pursuing the endless series of the king's inventions; and
his majesty will sometimes pass an afternoon watching and talking with
Rubam at his work. But the males are still outsiders; none seems to be
armed, none is intrusted with a key; by dusk they are all usually
departed from the palace; and the weight of the monarchy and of the
monarch's life reposes unshared on the women.

Here is a household unlike, indeed, to one of ours; more unlike still to
the Oriental harem: that of an elderly childless man, his days menaced,
dwelling alone amid a bevy of women of all ages, ranks, and
relationships,--the mother, the sister, the cousin, the legitimate wife,
the concubine, the favourite, the eldest born, and she of yesterday; he,
in their midst, the only master, the only male, the sole dispenser of
honours, clothes, and luxuries, the sole mark of multitudinous ambitions
and desires. I doubt if you could find a man in Europe so bold as to
attempt this piece of tact and government. And seemingly Tembinok'
himself had trouble in the beginning. I hear of him shooting at a wife
for some levity on board a schooner. Another, on some more serious
offence, he slew outright; he exposed her body in an open box, and (to
make the warning more memorable) suffered it to putrefy before the
palace gate. Doubtless his growing years have come to his assistance;
for upon so large a scale it is more easy to play the father than the
husband. And to-day, at least to the eye of a stranger, all seems to go
smoothly, and the wives to be proud of their trust, proud of their rank,
and proud of their cunning lord.

I conceived they made rather a hero of the man. A popular master in a
girls' school might, perhaps, offer a figure of his prep