nd resented reproof, even from me, their father. And
often they quarrelled and fought.

"When they were become sixteen years of age, they were tatooed in the
Samoan fashion, and that cost me much in money and presents. But Tui,
who was the elder by a little while, was jealous that his brother Galu
had been tatooed first. And yet the two loved each other--as I will show
thee.

"One day my wife and the two boys went into the mountains to get wild
bananas. They cut three heavy bunches and were returning home, when
Galu and Tui began to quarrel, on the steep mountain path. They came to
blows, and their mother, in trying to separate them, lost her footing
and fell far below on to a bed of lava. She died quickly.

"The two boys descended and held her dead body in their arms for a long
while, and wept together over her face. Then they carried her down the
mountain side into the village, and said to the people:--

"'We, Tui and Galu, have killed our mother through our quarrelling. Tell
our father Kala-hoi, that we fear to meet him, and now go to expiate our
crime.'

"They ran away swiftly; they climbed the mountain side, and, with arms
around each other, sprang over the cliff from which their mother had
fallen. And when I, and many others with me, found them, they were both
dead."

"Thou hast had a bitter sorrow, Kala-hoi." "Aye, a bitter sorrow. But
yet in my dreams I see them all. And sometimes, even in my work, as I
make my nets, I hear the boys' voices, quarrelling, and my wife saying,
'Be still, ye boys, lest I call thy father to chastise thee both '."

As the girls brought us the kava Marsh put his hand on the old, smooth,
brown pate, and saw that the eyes of the net-maker were filled with
tears.

CHAPTER XI ~ THE KANAKA LABOUR TRADE IN THE PACIFIC

The _fiat_ has gone forth from the Australian Commonwealth, and the
Kanaka labour trade, as far as the Australian Colonies are concerned,
has ceased to exist. For, during the month of November, 1906, the
Queensland Government began to deport to their various islands in the
Solomon and New Hebrides Groups, the last of the Melanesian native
labourers employed on the Queensland sugar plantations.

The Kanaka labour traffic, generally termed "black-birding," began about
1863, when sugar and cotton planters found that natives of the South
Sea Islands could be secured at a much less cost than Chinese or Indian
coolies. The genesis of the traffic was a tragedy, and