in some districts. The crops
were bad. The custard apples were small. The best-bearing avocado on the
windward coast had mysteriously shed all its leaves. The taste had
gone from the mangoes. The plantains were eaten by a worm. The fish had
forsaken the ocean and vast numbers of tiger-sharks appeared. The wild
goats had fled to inaccessible summits. The poi in the poi-pits had
turned bitter. There were rumblings in the mountains, night-walking
of spirits; a woman of Punta-Puna had been struck speechless, and a
five-legged she-goat had been born in the village of Eiho. And that all
was due to the strange money of Fulualea was the firm conviction of the
elders in the village councils assembled.

Uiliami spoke for the army. His men were discontented and mutinous.
Though by royal decree the traders were bidden accept the money, yet did
they refuse it. He would not say, but it looked as if the strange money
of Fulualea had something to do with it.

Ieremia, as talking man of the traders, next spoke. When he arose, it
was noticeable that he stood with legs spraddled over a large grass
basket. He dwelt upon the cloth of the traders, its variety and beauty
and durability, which so exceeded the Fitu-Ivan wet-pounded tapa,
fragile and coarse. No one wore tapa any more. Yet all had worn
tapa, and nothing but tapa, before the traders came. There was the
mosquito-netting, sold for a song, that the cleverest Fitu-Ivan
net-weaver could not duplicate in a thousand years. He enlarged on the
incomparable virtues of rifles, axes, and steel fishhooks, down through
needles, thread and cotton fish-lines to white flour and kerosene oil.

He expounded at length, with firstlies and secondlies and all minor
subdivisions of argument, on organization, and order, and civilization.
He contended that the trader was the bearer of civilization, and that
the trader must be protected in his trade else he would not come. Over
to the westward were islands which would not protect the traders. What
was the result? The traders would not come, and the people were like
wild animals. They wore no clothes, no silk shirts (here he peered and
blinked significantly at the king), and they ate one another.

The queer paper of the Feathers of the Sun was not money. The traders
knew what money was, and they would not receive it. If Fitu-Iva
persisted in trying to make them receive it they would go away and never
come back. And then the Fitu-Ivans, who had forgotten