ibles. And there Mauki was sent,
though he never arrived. The schooner stopped at Santa Anna, and in the
night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and a case of tobacco
from the trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval. Malaita was now to
the north, fifty or sixty miles away. But when he attempted the passage,
he was caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa Anna, where
the trader clapped him in irons and held him against the return of the
schooner from Santa Cruz. The two rifles the trader recovered, but the
case of tobacco was charged up to Mauki at the rate of another year. The
sum of years he now owed the Company was six.

On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped anchor in Marau
Sound, which lies at the southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki
swam ashore with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the bush. The
schooner went on, but the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand
sticks, and to him Mauki was brought by the bushmen with a year and
eight months tacked on to his account. Again, and before the schooner
called in, he got away, this time in a whale boat accompanied by a case
of the trader's tobacco. But a northwest gale wrecked him upon Ugi,
where the Christian natives stole his tobacco and turned him over to the
Moongleam trader who resided there. The tobacco the natives stole meant
another year for him, and the tale was now eight years and a half.

"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby. "Bunster is there, and
we'll let them settle it between them. It will be a case, I imagine, of
Mauki getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance in
either event."

If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due north,
magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles he will lift the
pounded coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe is a ring of
land some one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, several hundred
yards wide at its widest, and towering in places to a height of ten feet
above sea level. Inside this ring of sand is a mighty lagoon studded
with coral patches. Lord Howe belongs to the Solomons neither
geographically nor ethnologically. It is an atoll, while the Solomons
are high islands; and its people and language are Polynesian, while the
inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.

Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which
continues to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon i