The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1898-04-03

strange white man for months. held
out his hand, and then took the first
opportunity of escaping from the room
to join his playmates outside.
Hes all 1 have left" continued the
trader. land I'm doing my best to bring
him up as an Englishman. But what
can l do here? He must play with the
Samoan boys, or with no one. and L
cannot afford to send him away to
school. The little girls better off;
she's gone with a missionary to sgd
ney, and he takes good care of her.
She'll grow up into a white lady, L
suppose, some day, and won't know
her old father"
There was long pause and we drank
more kava and smoked in silence.
! Then the old gentleman became rem
iniscent.
''She was years old when the old
woman died, and the boy here, well, he
could just toddle about, holding onto
his mothers skirts. There was some
who blamed me for taking her to that
outlandish New Britain, where the peo-
pie are real saVages, and not civilized,
like here. But what was 1 to do? I'd
been Trading for McAiister & Co.
you've heard of them, 1 suppose-when
the firm broke up, and l was left
stranded on the beach. l hadn't had a
chance to save much, and there was the
wife and child to keep. When l got
theNoffer to go to New Britain and open
up some new trading stations, jumped
at it, without thinking overmuch of the
risk
Il was a fool, I know; and now, if 1
could only take it all back" He took
another cup of kava TO hide his emo
ton
I could think of nothing appropriate
to say, so l sat and waited, while the
girl. squatting on the floor, looked up
in her masters face and thoughtfully
began to prepare second bowl of
kava.
AT last he resumed the broken narra-
tive: We got on all right as long as
we were at the head station, where
there were several whites, and the ma
tiYes had, in a way, learned some man
nerS. But when / went away to dis
tant parts of the isle to open up new
stations, L began to feel sorry that I'd
brought the missus with me. But she
would not hear of going back; not she.
She swore shed stick TO me through
thick and thin, and so she did till the
end.
But, to cut a long story short. We
opened up three or four stations safely
enough. We used to go, just ourselves,
in boat, with our boxes OF trade. and
a crew of four boys from the Duke of
YORK isle. They were more afraid OF
being eaten than we were, boys, so
they stuck to us pretty close:
1T was the cheek OF the thing did it,
and l wonder now, when 1 look back,
that we were not killed and cooked a
dozen times over. The natives simply
could not understand a white man
coming among them like that, all alone,
and they were SO astonished that they
forgot to attack us. They were poor
lot of savages, going about quite naked,
and if you gave one of them piece of
print, he would hang 1t around his neck
and walk away, as proud as Punch.
They were always fighting amongst
themselves, and thought no more of
killing a man than we would of shoot
ing a pigeon. Why, I've seen young
fellow executed there just for stealing
a cocoanut off a chiefs tree, and if
they had dared they would have killed
me as readily for the sake of my trade.
They hadn't much to buy goods
with, either, little copra and some
beche- de-mer and pearl shells. They
wanted axes and tomahawks and
knives, but most of all they wanted to-
bacco pipes, common clay pipes. What
they did with them l don't know, Ter
they did not buy any tobacco. Kept
them as q sort OF idol or fetish, l sup