The innocent first-fruits of Mota died three days later, and Mr. Patteson found a great howling and wailing going on over its little grave under a long low house.  This was hushed when he came up, and spoke of the Resurrection, and described the babe’s soul dwelling in peace in the Kingdom of the Father, where those would join it who would believe and repent, cast away their evil practices, and be baptized to live as children of God.  Kneeling down, he prayed over it, thanking God for having taken it to Himself, and interceding for all around.  They listened and seemed touched; no opposition was ever offered to him, but he found that there was much fighting and quarrelling, many of the villages at war with each other, and a great deal too much use of the bow and arrow, though the whole race was free from cannibalism.  They seemed to want to halt between two opinions:  to keep up their orgies on the one hand, and to make much of the white teacher on the other; and when we recollect that two unarmed Englishmen, and twelve blacks from other islands, were perfectly isolated in the midst of a heathen population, having refused protection from a British man-of-war, it gives a grandeur to the following narrative:—­

’June 7th.—­One of their chief men has just been with two bread-fruit as a present.  I detected him as a leader of one of their chief ceremonies yesterday, and I have just told him plainly that I cannot accept anything from him, neither can I suffer him to be coming to my place while it is notorious that he is teaching the children the very things they ought not to learn, and that he is strongly supporting the old false system, while he professes to be listening attentively to the Word of God.  I made him take up his two bread-fruit and carry them away; and I suppose it will be the story all over the village that I have driven him away.

’"By-and-by we will listen to the Word of God, when we have finished these ceremonies.”

’"Yes, you hearken first to the voice of the evil spirit; you choose him firsthand then you will care to hear about God.’”

The ceremony was to last twenty days, and only affected the lads, who were blackened all over with soot, and apparently presented pigs to the old priest, and were afterwards admitted to the privileges of eating and sleeping in the separate building, which formed a kind of club-house for the men of each village, and on which Mr. Patteson could always reckon as both a lecture room and sleeping place.

The people kept on saying that ‘by-and-by’ they would make an end of their wild ritual, and throw down their enclosures, and at the same time they thronged to talk to him at the Mission station, and built a shed to serve for a school at Auta.