of the
denizens of the eight islands.

Twenty years had passed, and, save for a few wandering sperm whalers,
the great fleet of the olden days had vanished; for the Civil War
in America had borne its fruit even put upon the placid Pacific, and
Waddell, in the Confederate cruiser _Shenandoah_, had swept northwards
from Australia, bent on burning every ship that flew the hated Stars
and Stripes. So, with fear in their hearts, the Yankee whaling skippers
hurried into neutral ports for shelter; and not a day too soon, for the
rebel war-vessel caught four of them at Ponape Island, burnt them and
went up to the Arctic to destroy the rest.

Then followed years of quiet, for only a very few of the whaleships
returned, and, one by one, most of the white men wandered away to the
far distant isles of the north-west, taking their wives and families
with them, till there were but five or six remaining in the whole Ellice
Group.

Among those who sailed away one day in a whale-ship was a trader named
Harry. His surname was never known. To his fellow white men and the
natives of the island of Nukufetau on which he lived he was simply
"Harry"; to those of the other islands of the group he was _Hari Tino
Kehe_, Big Harry.

It was not that he was wearied of the monotony of his existence on
Nukufetau that had led Harry to bid his wife and two children farewell,
but because that he had heard rumours of the richness in pearl-shell and
turtle-shell of the far distant isles of the Pelew Group, and desired
to go there and satisfy himself as to the truth of these sailors' tales;
for he was a steady, honest man, although he had run away from his ship,
a Sydney sandal-wooding vessel; and during his fifteen years' residence
on Nukufetau he had made many thousands of dollars by selling coconut
oil to the Sydney trading ships, and provisions to the American whalers.
A year after his arrival on the island he had married a native woman
named Te Ava Malu (Calm Waters). She was the daughter of the chief's
brother, and brought her husband as her dowry a long, narrow strip of
land richly covered with countless thousands of coco-palms, and it was
from these groves of coconuts that Harry had earned most of the bright
silver dollars, which, in default of a strong box, he had headed up in
a small beef keg and buried under the gravelled floor of his thatched
dwelling-house.

Children had been born to him--two fair-skinned, dark-eyed, and
gentle-voiced g