one or two of his wives lie covered from the sun under mats, tossed by the short sea of the lagoon, and enduring agonies of heat and tedium.  This severity is now and then relaxed and the wives allowed on board.  Three or four were thus favoured on the day of our arrival:  substantial ladies airily attired in ridis.  Each had a share of copra, her peculium, to dispose of for herself.  The display in the trade-room—­hats, ribbbons, dresses, scents, tins of salmon—­the pride of the eye and the lust of the flesh—­tempted them in vain.  They had but the one idea—­tobacco, the island currency, tantamount to minted gold; returned to shore with it, burthened but rejoicing; and late into the night, on the royal terrace, were to be seen counting the sticks by lamplight in the open air.

The king is no such economist.  He is greedy of things new and foreign.  House after house, chest after chest, in the palace precinct, is already crammed with clocks, musical boxes, blue spectacles, umbrellas, knitted waistcoats, bolts of stuff, tools, rifles, fowling-pieces, medicines, European foods, sewing-machines, and, what is more extraordinary, stoves:  all that ever caught his eye, tickled his appetite, pleased him for its use, or puzzled him with its apparent inutility.  And still his lust is unabated.  He is possessed by the seven devils of the collector.  He hears a thing spoken of, and a shadow comes on his face.  ’I think I no got him,’ he will say; and the treasures he has seem worthless in comparison.  If a ship be bound for Apemama, the merchant racks his brain to hit upon some novelty.  This he leaves carelessly in the main cabin or partly conceals in his own berth, so that the king shall spy it for himself.  ‘How much you want?’ inquires Tembinok’, passing and pointing.  ‘No, king; that too dear,’ returns the trader.  ‘I think I like him,’ says the king.  This was a bowl of gold-fish.  On another occasion it was scented soap.  ’No, king; that cost too much,’ said the trader; ‘too good for a Kanaka.’  ‘How much you got?  I take him all,’ replied his majesty, and became the lord of seventeen boxes at two dollars a cake.  Or again, the merchant feigns the article is not for sale, is private property, an heirloom or a gift; and the trick infallibly succeeds.  Thwart the king and you hold him.  His autocratic nature rears at the affront of opposition.  He accepts it for a challenge; sets his teeth like a hunter going at a fence; and with no mark of emotion, scarce even of interest, stolidly piles up the price.  Thus, for our sins, he took a fancy to my wife’s dressing-bag, a thing entirely useless to the man, and sadly battered by years of service.  Early one forenoon he came to our house, sat down, and abruptly offered to purchase it.  I told him I sold nothing, and the bag at any rate was a present from a friend; but he was acquainted with these pretexts from of old, and knew what they were worth and how to meet them.  Adopting what I believe is called ’the