ght take grace. These notes are only to show I
hold you in mind, though I know they can have no interest for man or God
or animal.

I should have told you about the Club. We have been asked to try and
start a sort of weekly ball for the half-castes and natives, ourselves
to be the only whites; and we consented, from a very heavy sense of
duty, and with not much hope. Two nights ago we had twenty people up,
received them in the front verandah, entertained them on cake and
lemonade, and I made a speech--embodying our proposals, or conditions,
if you like--for I suppose thirty minutes. No joke to speak to such an
audience, but it is believed I was thoroughly intelligible. I took the
plan of saying everything at least twice in a different form of words,
so that if the one escaped my hearers, the other might be seized. One
white man came with his wife, and was kept rigorously on the front
verandah below! You see what a sea of troubles this is like to prove;
but it is the only chance--and when it blows up, it must blow up! I have
no more hope in anything than a dead frog; I go into everything with a
composed despair, and don't mind--just as I always go to sea with the
conviction I am to be drowned, and like it before all other pleasures.
But you should have seen the return voyage, when nineteen horses had to
be found in the dark, and nineteen bridles, all in a drench of rain, and
the club, just constituted as such, sailed away in the wet, under a
cloudy moon like a bad shilling, and to descend a road through the
forest that was at that moment the image of a respectable mountain
brook. My wife, who is president _with power to expel_, had to begin her
functions....

_25th March._--Heaven knows what day it is, but I am ashamed, all the
more as your letter from Bournemouth of all places--poor old
Bournemouth!--is to hand, and contains a statement of pleasure in my
letters which I wish I could have rewarded with a long one. What has
gone on? A vast of affairs, of a mingled, strenuous, inconclusive,
desultory character; much waste of time, much riding to and fro, and
little transacted or at least peracted.

Let me give you a review of the present state of our live stock.--Six
boys in the bush; six souls about the house. Talolo, the cook, returns
again to-day, after an absence which has cost me about twelve hours of
riding, and I suppose eight hours' solemn sitting in council. "I am
sorry indeed for the Chief Justice of Samoa," I