the processes described may be compared to a gardener’s graft.  He passes bodily into the native stock; ceases wholly to be alien; has entered the commune of the blood, shares the prosperity and consideration of his new family, and is expected to impart with the same generosity the fruits of his European skill and knowledge.  It is this implied engagement that so frequently offends the ingrafted white.  To snatch an immediate advantage—­to get (let us say) a station for his store—­he will play upon the native custom and become a son or a brother for the day, promising himself to cast down the ladder by which he shall have ascended, and repudiate the kinship so soon as it shall grow burdensome.  And he finds there are two parties to the bargain.  Perhaps his Polynesian relative is simple, and conceived the blood-bond literally; perhaps he is shrewd, and himself entered the covenant with a view to gain.  And either way the store is ravaged, the house littered with lazy natives; and the richer the man grows, the more numerous, the more idle, and the more affectionate he finds his native relatives.  Most men thus circumstanced contrive to buy or brutally manage to enforce their independence; but many vegetate without hope, strangled by parasites.

We had no cause to blush with Brother Michel.  Our new parents were kind, gentle, well-mannered, and generous in gifts; the wife was a most motherly woman, the husband a man who stood justly high with his employers.  Enough has been said to show why Moipu should be deposed; and in Paaaeua the French had found a reputable substitute.  He went always scrupulously dressed, and looked the picture of propriety, like a dark, handsome, stupid, and probably religious young man hot from a European funeral.  In character he seemed the ideal of what is known as the good citizen.  He wore gravity like an ornament.  None could more nicely represent the desired character as an appointed chief, the outpost of civilisation and reform.  And yet, were the French to go and native manners to revive, fancy beholds him crowned with old men’s beards and crowding with the first to a man-eating festival.  But I must not seem to be unjust to Paaaeua.  His respectability went deeper than the skin; his sense of the becoming sometimes nerved him for unexpected rigours.

One evening Captain Otis and Mr. Osbourne were on shore in the village.  All was agog; dancing had begun; it was plain it was to be a night of festival, and our adventurers were overjoyed at their good fortune.  A strong fall of rain drove them for shelter to the house of Paaaeua, where they were made welcome, wiled into a chamber, and shut in.  Presently the rain took off, the fun was to begin in earnest, and the young bloods of Atuona came round the house and called to my fellow-travellers through the interstices of the wall.  Late into the night the calls were continued and resumed, and sometimes mingled with taunts; late into the night the prisoners, tantalised