now (sitting themselves in safety) egged him on to a new peril,

which was all gain to them, all loss to him! I asked him what he

thought of the danger from the feast.

'I think worse of it than any of you,' he answered. 'They were

shooting around here last night, and I heard the balls too. I said

to myself, "That's bad." What gets me is why you should be making

this row up at your end. I should be the first to go.'

It was a thoughtless wonder. The consolation of being second is

not great; the fact, not the order of going--there was our concern.

Scott talks moderately of looking forward to a time of fighting

'with a feeling that resembled pleasure.' The resemblance seems

rather an identity. In modern life, contact is ended; man grows

impatient of endless manoeuvres; and to approach the fact, to find

ourselves where we can push an advantage home, and stand a fair

risk, and see at last what we are made of, stirs the blood. It was

so at least with all my family, who bubbled with delight at the

approach of trouble; and we sat deep into the night like a pack of

schoolboys, preparing the revolvers and arranging plans against the

morrow. It promised certainly to be a busy and eventful day. The

Old Men were to be summoned to confront me on the question of the

tapu; Muller might call us at any moment to garrison his bar; and

suppose Muller to fail, we decided in a family council to take that

matter into our own hands, The Land we Live in at the pistol's

mouth, and with the polysyllabic Williams, dance to a new tune. As

I recall our humour I think it would have gone hard with the

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