med palms casting
wavering shadows on the yellow sand as they sway and swish softly to
the breath of the brave trade-wind that whistles through the
thickly-verdured hummocks on the weather side of the island, to die away
into a soft breath as, after passing through the belt of cocoanuts, it
faintly ripples the transparent depths of the lagoon--a broad sheet of
blue and silver stretching away from the far distant western line
of reef to the smooth, yellow beach at the foot of the palms on the
easternmost islet. And here, beneath their lofty crowns, are the brown
thatched huts of the people and the home of Lupton the trader.

*****

This is Mururea. And, if it be possible, Mururea surpasses in beauty any
other of the "cloud of islands" which, lying on the blue bosom of the
Eastern Pacific like the islands of a dream, are called by their people
the Paumotu. And these people--it is not of very long ago I speak--are a
people unto themselves. Shy and suspicious of strangers, white or brown,
and endued with that quick instinct of fear which impels untutored
minds to slay, and which we, in our civilised ignorance, call savage
treachery, they are yet kind-hearted and hospitable to those who learn
their ways and regard their customs. A tall, light-skinned, muscular
people, the men with long, straight, black hair, coiled up in a knot at
the back, and the women--the descendants of those who sailed with broken
Fletcher Christian and his comrades of the _Bounty_ in quest of a place
where to die--soft-voiced, and with big, timorous eyes.

*****

'Twas here that Ben Peese, the handsome, savagely humorous, and voluble
colleague of Captain "Bully" Hayes, the modern rover of the South
Seas, one day appeared. Lupton, with his son and two natives, were out
searching the beach of a little islet for turtles' eggs, when the boy,
who had been sent to obtain a few young drinking cocoanuts from a tree
some little distance away, called out, "_Te Pahi!_" (a ship). A few
minutes passed, and then, outlined against the narrow strip of cocoanuts
that grew on the north end of the main islet of the lagoon, Lupton saw
the sails of a schooner making for the only opening--a narrow passage on
the eastern side.

Now vessels came but rarely to Mururea, for Du Petit Thouars, the French
Admiral of the Pacific fleet, had long since closed the group to the
Sydney trading ships that once came there for pearl-shell, and Lupton
felt uneasy. The vessel belonging