e both
lowered boats and exchanged visits.

Warren and I had not met for over two years, since he and I had been
shipmates in a labour vessel sailing out of Samoa--he as mate and I as
"recruiter"--so we had much to talk about.

"Oh, by-the-way," he remarked as we were saying good-bye, "of course you
have heard of that shipload of unwashed saints who have been cruising
around the South Seas in search of a Promised Land?"

"Yes, I believe that they have gone off to Tonga or Fiji, trying to
light upon 'the Home Beautiful,' and are very hard up. The people in
Fiji will have nothing to do with that crowd--if they have gone there."

"They have not. They turned back for Honolulu, and are now at Butaritari
and in an awful mess. Some of the saints came on board and wanted me to
give them a passage to Sydney. You must go and have a look at them and
their rotten old brig, the _Julia_. Oh, they are a lovely lot--full of
piety and as dirty as Indian fakirs. Ah Sam, our agent at Butaritari,
will tell you all about them. He has had such a sickener of the holy
men that it will do you good to hear him talk. What the poor devils are
going to do I don't know. I gave them a little provisions--all I could
spare, but their appearance so disgusted me that I was not too civil
to them. They cannot get away from Butaritari as the old brig is not
seaworthy, and there is nothing in the way of food to be had in the
island except coco-nuts and fish--manna is out of season in the South
Seas just now. Good-bye, old man, and good luck."

On the following day we sighted Butaritari Island--one of the largest
atolls in the North Pacific, and inhabited by a distinctly unamiable
and cantankerous race of Malayo-Polynesians whose principal amusement
in their lighter hours is to get drunk on sour toddy and lacerate each
other's bodies with sharks' teeth swords. In addition to Ah Sam, the
agent for the Chinese trading firm, there were two European traders who
had married native women and eked out a lonely existence by buying copra
(dried coco-nut) and sharks' fins when they were sober enough to attend
to business--which was infrequent. However, Butaritari was a good
recruiting ground for ships engaged in the labour traffic, owing to the
continuous internecine wars, for the vanquished parties, after their
coco-nut trees had been cut down and their canoes destroyed had the
choice of remaining and having their throats cut or going away in a
labour ship to Tah