’I don’t trouble myself much about cooking.  My little canteen is capital; and I can make myself all sorts of good things, if I choose to take the trouble, and some days I do so.  I bake a little bread now and then, and natter myself it is uncommonly good; and one four-pound tin of Bloxland’s preserved meat from Queensland has already lasted me twelve days, and there is about half of it remaining.  He reckons each pound well soaked and cooked to be equal to three pounds, and I think he is right.  A very little of this, with a bit of yam deliciously cooked, and brought to me each day as a present by some one from their cooking ovens, makes a capital dinner.  Then I have some rice and sugar for breakfast, a biscuit and coffee, and a bit of bread-fruit perhaps; and all the little delicacies are here—­ salt, pepper, mustard, even to a bottle of pickles—­so I am pretty well off, I think.

’I find that the white ant, or an insect like it, is here.  The plates of our old hut are quite rotten, the outside still untouched, all within like tinder.  They call the insect vanoa; it is not found in New Zealand, but it is a sad nuisance in Australia.

’I do not read much here this time, so much of every day is taken up with talking to the people about me.  That is all right, and I generally can turn the talk to something that I wish them to hear, so it is all in the way of business here.  And I am glad to say that my school, and conversations and lessons, need some careful preparation.  I have spent some time in drawing up for myself a little scheme of teaching for people in the state of my friends here.  I ought of course to have done it long ago, and it is a poor thing now.  I cannot take a real pleasure in teaching, and so I do it badly.  I am always, almost always, glad when school is over, though sometimes I get much interested myself, though not often able to interest others.

’I am reading some Hebrew nearly every day, and Lightfoot on the Galatians, Tyler’s “Researches into the Early History of Mankind,” Dollinger’s “First Ages of the Church,” and “Ecce Homo.”  I tried Maine’s “Ancient Law,” but it is too tough for the tropics, unless I chance to feel very fresh.  I generally get an hour in the evening, if I am sleeping at home.

’May 23rd.—­I suppose anyone who has lived in a dirty Irish village—­ pigs, fowls, and children equally noisy and filthy, and the parents wild, ignorant, and impulsive—­may have some notion of this kind of thing.  You never get a true account, much less a true illustration of the real thing.  Did you happen to see a ridiculous engraving on one of the S. P. Gr. sheets some years ago, supposed to be me taking two Ambrym boys to the boat? (Footnote:  No such engraving can be found by the S. P. Gr.  It was probably put forth in some other publication.) Now it is much better not to draw at all than to draw something which can only mislead people.  If Ambrym boys really looked