owing their imperial imperiousness, they
built over some ruins left by their devastations a great church, in
which they ordered all the islanders to worship. This was at first
abomination to the islanders, who fought like devils whenever they
could, and ended by accepting the religion of their foes. But the
conquerors, afterwards choosing to change their own faith, resolved
that the islanders should do so too. Forthwith they confiscated the big
church and burying-ground, and, distributing part of the land and spoils
among their most prominent scamps, erected a new edifice of quite a
different character, in which the natives swore they could neither see
nor hear, and their own clerics warned them they would certainly be
damned. To make the complications more intricate, these clerics owed
allegiance to an ancient woman in a distant country, who had all the
meddlesomeness and petty jealousy of her sex, and was, besides, much
attached to some clever wooers of hers, wily sinners who covered their
aims under the semblance of ultra-extreme passion for her. The prominent
scamps died, to be succeeded by their children, or other of the hated
conquerors, from generation to generation. The islanders went on
increasing and protesting. T hey starved upon the lands, and shot the
landlords when a few gave them the chance, for most lived away in their
own country, and left the property to be administered by agents. The
Home Government had again and again been obliged to assist these people
with soldiers, to provide an armed police, to shoot down mobs, to catch
a ringleader here or there and send him to Fernando Po, or to deprive
whole villages of ordinary civil rights. Then the yam crop failed, and
nearly half the people left the island and crossed the seas, where they
continued to hate and to plot against those whose misfortune it had been
to get a legacy of the island from their fathers. It would be wearisome
to recount the absurdities on both sides: the stupidity or criminal
absence of tact from time to time shown by the Home Government--the
resolve never to be quiet exhibited by the natives, under the prompting
of their clerics. Upon

"--that common stage of novelty--"

there were ever springing up fresh difficulties. Secret clubs were
formed for murder and reprisal. A body called the "Yellows" had bound
themselves by private oaths to keep up the memory of the religious
victories of their predecessors, and to worry the clerica