’May 24.—­On Monday, at 3 P.M., we sailed from Port Patteson across to Mota.  Here I landed among 750 people and the boat returned to the vessel.  She was to keep up to windward during the night and call for me the next morning.  I walked with my large following, from the teach, up a short steep path, to the village, near to which, indeed only 200 yards off, is another considerable village.  The soil is excellent; the houses good—­built round the open space which answers to the green in our villages, and mighty banyan trees spreading their lofty and wide-branching arms above and around them.  The side walls of these houses are not more than two feet high, made only of bamboos lashed by cocoa-nut fibre, or wattled together, and the long sloping roofs nearly touch ground but within they are tolerably clean and quite dry.  The moon was in the first quarter, and the scene was striking as I sat out in the open space with some 200 people crowding round me—­men, women and children; fires in front where yams were roasting; the dark brown forms glancing to and fro in the flickering light; the moon’s rays quivering down through the vast trees, and the native hollow drum beating at intervals to summon the people to the monthly feast on the morrow.  I slept comfortably on a mat in a cottage with many other persons in it.  Much talk I had with a large concourse outside, and again in this cottage, on Christianity; and all were quiet when I knelt down as usual and said my evening prayers.  Up at 5.30 A.M., and walked up a part of the Sugar Loaf peak, from which the island derives its English name, and found a small clear stream, flowing, through a rocky bed, back to the village, where were some 300 people assembled; sat some time with them, then went to the beach, where the boat soon came for me.

’After this there was a good deal of bad weather; but all the lads were restored to their islands, including Aroana, the young Malanta chief, who had begun by a fit of frenzy, but had since behaved well; and who left his English friends with a promise to do all in his power to tame his people and cure them of cannibalism.’

Then came some foul winds and hot exhausting weather.

’I have done little more than read Stanley’s “Sinai and Palestine,” and Helps’s “Spanish America,” two excellent books and most delightful to me.  The characters in the Spanish conquest of Mexico and America generally; the whole question of the treatment of natives; and that nobleman, Las Casas—­are more intelligible to me than to most persons probably.  The circumstances of my present life enable me to realise it to a greater extent.

’Then I have been dipping into a little ethnology; yesterday a little Plato; but it is almost too hot for anything that requires a working head-piece.  You know I take holiday time this voyage when we are in open water and no land near, and it is great relaxation to me.’

A pretty severe gale of wind followed, a sharp test of Patteson’s seamanship.