more troubled than ourselves.

At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man

of the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in

the Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the

American whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his

English, his down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent

life. For one captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to

Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals. 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

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