The motive for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners. And the act itself was simply murder. Tari's life must have hung in the beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which he was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and ordained him to be spared. He escaped at least alive, married in the island, and when I knew him was a widower with a married son and a granddaughter. But the thought of Oahu haunted him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and dance; and in his dreams I daresay he revisits it with joy. I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land sold, for planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai? So simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so sadly, the changes come.

Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run up by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron saucepan, several cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil; while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink, and carried me up the den 'to see my house' - the only entertainment that he had to offer.

He liked the 'Amelican,' he said, and the 'Inglisman,' but the 'Flessman' was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that if he had thought us 'Fless,' we should have had none of his nuts, and never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can partly understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo- Saxon. The next day he brought me a pig, and some days later one of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second. We were still strange to the islands; we were pained by the poor man's generosity, which he could ill afford, and, by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder, we refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no more; being what he was, the most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a hundred times more painful.

Scarce had the canoe with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the CASCO was boarded from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because he had no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a stranger in the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my family basely fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured friend alone; and the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour, for he was loath to tear himself away. 'You go 'way. I see you no more - no, sir!' he lamented; and then looking about him with rueful admiration, 'This goodee ship - no, sir! - goodee ship!' he would exclaim: the 'no, sir,' thrown out sharply through the nose upon a rising inflection, an echo from New Bedford and the fallacious whaler. From these expressions of grief and praise, he would return continually to the case of the rejected pig. 'I like give present all 'e same you,' he complained; 'only got pig: you no take him!' He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it.

I have rarely been more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so innocently dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech is vain. Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most Anaho women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a mite of a creature at the breast. I went up the den one day when Tari was from home, and found the son making a cotton sack, and madame suckling mademoiselle. When I had sat down with them on the floor, the girl began to question me about England; which I tried to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells one upon another to represent the houses, and explaining, as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the perpetual toil. 'PAS DE COCOTIERS? PAS DO POPOI?' she asked. I told her it was too cold, and went through an elaborate performance, shutting out draughts, and crouching over an imaginary fire, to make sure she understood. But she understood right well; remarked it must be bad for the health, and sat a while gravely reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows. I am sure it roused her pity, for it struck in her another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people.

 'ICI PAS DE KANAQUES,' said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her hands. 'TENEZ - a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more.' The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.

They had already destroyed their idols, by the command of their king Rihoriho, son of the noble Kamehameha 1st, who was a man of ambitious spirit, and great powers, both of mind and body. They were a fine athletic race, their pleasures were innocent, they were contented with the position God had given them, and asked only to be left to the enjoyment of an unrivalled climate, and the spontaneous productions of Nature, their bounteous mother. What is the result of thirty years of missionary labor? Diseased, powerless, degraded, the people have sunk into the position of slaves, nor dare they raise a hand in opposition, so complete is the bondage in which they are held.

Fined, imprisoned, whipped for disobedience, they see themselves stripped of everything, by people who made laws to rob under, and therefore there is no redress. But they writhe under this oppression, and, cowed and miserable though they are, they only submit from the fear that the missionaries will pray them to death! They are firmly persuaded that this can be done, and if one is told that he will be " prayed to death," all the terrors of imagination are roused; he retires to his hut chilled with a supernatural fear, lays himself down in resignation to his fate, and in the-course of a few weeks, actually sinks into the grave. 0, Superstition! Thou friend of missionaries, and terror of barbarians!

 There are many, especially in Honolulu, in whom a sense of the monstrous injustice they suffer rankles like a poisonous sting, and the chief sufferer, in pain as in rank, is the royal Kamehameha 3d, who fully feels the mockery of his position. Noble in person, generous to a fault, he has still something of the spirit of his grand old ancestor, Ka-me-ha-meha 1st. But he has been from his boyhood so encircled by a complicated web of restrictions and curtailments, which he had not patience to unravel, nor strength to break through, that he has thrown off in disgust all pretensions to royalty, except the name, and has repeatedly declared his intention to abdicate the throne, and live in peaceful retirement.

 But this would not at all suit the wire-workers; they might not find another king so docile, or so much beloved by his people, and, aware of the general discontent, they dread any change which may serve as an excuse for throwing off their authority. Thus, for a little while they put off the evil day; but the time will soon come when they must yield up their ill-gotten power, and retire into their native insignificance. The farce of royalty acted here reminds me of a play among school-boys, called the " dumb orator," where one boy stands perfectly still and speaks, while another, concealed behind him, makes the motions. Poor Kamehamreha makes the motions, but has not a word to say for himself.

The real king of the Sandwich Islands is Doctor G. P. Judd, a person of ordinary capacity and attainments, but extraordinary cunning, who came out here from Massachusetts about twenty years ago, attached to some missionary company as physician. Finding the climate so charming, and the opportunities so great, he decided to remain. By degrees he obtained the confidence of the king and principal chiefs, who, looking up to him as a Great Medicine, accepted his advice and assistance in forming a government and making new laws, till at last they found themselves completely in his power. He gave the principal state offices to his fast friends, reserving to himself that of Minister of Finance, which he still holds, and which, for many years, he administered without being responsible to anybody.

At last, so much complaint was made of his expenditure and use of the public monies, that an auditor was appointed, but always a creature of his own, who was very useful, for he did his bidding and formed his shield, at the same time. Meanwhile, his purchases and grants of land were immense, and, it is a matter of record, in the Government House, that he purchased at one time seventeen thousand acres of land for fifty cents! But if the king bestows a house and lot upon some faithful old servitor or friend, of whom Mr. Judd does not approve, lie is forthwith thrust out of it, and told to go about his business. The king's allowance is $12,000 per annum. A pitiful sum to keep up his extensive establishment, and gratify his liberality, which is truly royal. But nobody will give him credit, for even his note is not good except it has the signature of the Premier, who of course obeys Mr. Judd.

Meanwhile the king is penniless, and must have money; his faithful servant, Mr. Judd, loans it to him at a good rate of interest, and a mortgage on his land; the poor king, never able to pay, sees in despair the heritage of his fathers passing into the hands of his overgrown subject, whose arrogance and possessions hourly increase, until there is nobody in the eyes and mouths of the people, nobody in the estimation of foreigners, nobody, in fact, in all the Sandwich Islands, but Mr. Judd, Minister of Finance. Consuls, Minister of Foreign Relations, Ministers Plenipotentiary, all sink into insignificance, and, if any foreigners either American or otherwise, hopes to obtain favor, either from government or society, he pays assiduous court, not to the king, nor to the representative of his nation, but to Mr. Judd.

The laws and statutes, which were made and compiled under the fostering care of the Minister of Finance, are, a complete system of loopholes, through which, if a man chooses, he can slip with a large load upon his back, and even carry off whole plantations, if necessary. What a wonderful adaptation of means to ends.

Freedom of the press is one of the articles guarantied by the Hawaian constitution. For a long time, the people, especially foreign residents here, have been aware of the pressure of this " Old Man of the Sea " upon their necks, and desirous of unhorsing him. Already their trade was crippled by his exactions, their plantations ruined, and commerce destroyed. They believed their best remedy would be a liberal newspaper, which, by exposing the government, would eventually insure redress.

Accordingly, a weekly journal was commenced, which commented pretty freely upon the proceedings of the privy council and king Judd. The latter, wishing to obtain a certain offensive manuscript, invited the compositor to his house, and after plying him freely with wine, offered him three hundred dollars in geld if he would break open a certain trunk, where he knew it was deposited, and obtain it. The compositor, now very tipsy, consented, broke open the trunk, deposited the obnoxious paper in the hands of Mr. Judd, who immediately put him on board a schooner in waiting, and sent him down to Lahaina. The parties robbed, discovering the theft, pursued and brought the culprit back, who, now thoroughly sober, and full of remorse, went with them to Mr. Judd, and exposed the whole plot, which he did not deny, but coolly defied them to lay a finger on the Minister of Finance; and they dared not do it."

The Hawaii Stories of Jack London: