h its smiling green of lear, and soft,
heaving valleys, above the long lines of curving beach, showing white
and bright in the morning sun! And, as you walk, the surf upon the reef
for ever calls and calk; sometimes loudly with a deep, resonant boom,
but mostly with a soft, faint murmur like the low-breathed sigh of a
woman when she lies her cheek upon her lover's breast and looks upward
to his face with eyes aglow and lips trembling for his kiss.

Far, far above a feint note. 'Tis but a snow-white tropic bird,
suspended in mid-air on motionless wing, his long scarlet pendrices
almost invisible at such a height. Presently, as he discerns you, he
lets his aerial, slender form sink and sink, without apparent motion,
till he is within fifty feet, and then he turns his graceful head from
side to side, and inquiringly surveys you with his full, soft black eye.
For a moment or two he flutters his white wings gently and noiselessly,
and you can imagine you hear his timid heart-beats; then, satisfied with
his scrutiny, his fairy, graceful form floats upward into space again,
and is lost to view.

Leaving the beach and the sound of the droning surf behind us we turned
to the starboard hand, and struck through the narrow strip of littoral
towards the mountains. For the first mile or so our way was through a
grove of pandanus-palms, nearly every one of which was in full fruit; on
the branches were sitting hundreds of small sooty terns, who watched
our progress beneath with the calm indifference borne of the utter
confidence of immunity of danger from any human being.

Once through the sandy stretch on which the pandanus loves to grow,
we came to the outlier of the mountain lands--low, gently undulating
ridges, covered on both sides of the narrow track with dense thickets
of pineapples, every plant bearing a fruit half-matured, which, when
ripened, was never touched by the hand of man, for the whole island was,
in places, covered with thickets such as this, and the wild pig only
revelled among them.

"They grow thickly," I said to Nalik.

"Ay, _tahina_* they grow thickly and wild," he replied, with some
inflection of sadness in his voice; "long, long ago, before my father's
father lived, there was a great town here. That was long before we of
this land had ever seen a white man. And now we who are left are but as
dead leaves."

* Friend.

"How came it so to be?"

He shook his head. "I cannot tell. I only know that on