rang loud enough in the chorus) and looking about him like a man in fear of spies.  The strange thing is that I should have beheld him no more.  In any other island in the whole South Seas, if I had advanced half as far with any native, he would have been at my door next morning, bringing and expecting gifts.  But Te Kop vanished in the bush for ever.  My house, of course, was unapproachable; but he knew where to find me on the ocean beach, where I went daily.  I was the Kaupoi, the rich man; my tobacco and trade were known to be endless:  he was sure of a present.  I am at a loss how to explain his behaviour, unless it be supposed that he recalled with terror and regret a passage in our interview.  Here it is: 

‘The king, he good man?’ I asked.

‘Suppose he like you, he good man,’ replied Te Kop:  ’no like, no good.’

That is one way of putting it, of course.  Te Kop himself was probably no favourite, for he scarce appealed to my judgment as a type of industry.  And there must be many others whom the king (to adhere to the formula) does not like.  Do these unfortunates like the king?  Or is not rather the repulsion mutual? and the conscientious Tembinok’, like the conscientious Braxfield before him, and many other conscientious rulers and judges before either, surrounded by a considerable body of ‘grumbletonians’?  Take the cook, for instance, when he passed us by, blue with rage and terror.  He was very wroth with me; I think by all the old principles of human nature he was not very well pleased with his sovereign.  It was the rich man he sought to waylay:  I think it must have been by the turn of a hair that it was not the king he waylaid instead.  And the king gives, or seems to give, plenty of opportunities; day and night he goes abroad alone, whether armed or not I can but guess; and the taro-patches, where his business must so often carry him, seem designed for assassination.  The case of the cook was heavy indeed to my conscience.  I did not like to kill my enemy at second-hand; but had I a right to conceal from the king, who had trusted me, the dangerous secret character of his attendant?  And suppose the king should fall, what would be the fate of the king’s friends?  It was our opinion at the time that we should pay dear for the closing of the well; that our breath was in the king’s nostrils; that if the king should by any chance be bludgeoned in a taro-patch, the philosophical and musical inhabitants of Equator Town might lay aside their pleasant instruments, and betake themselves to what defence they had, with a very dim prospect of success.  These speculations were forced upon us by an incident which I am ashamed to betray.  The schooner H. L. Haseltine (since capsized at sea, with the loss of eleven lives) put into Apemama in a good hour for us, who had near exhausted our supplies.  The king, after his habit, spent day after day on board; the gin proved unhappily to his taste; he brought a store of it ashore with him;