Last night Mr. Henderson pulled off a rat's tail. He thought to pull the rat from a hole from which the tail protruded, but the tail came off, and the rat ran away. The captain tells me that there is generally a plague of flies in Nuieue. It is too cold for them now, but usually when the natives come out in their canoes their backs, especially, are black with flies. Some one has sent me a basket of bananas almost too sweet and rich; also some excellent oranges. I have mended the bellows of our camera, where it has been eaten by cockroaches, with sticking-plaster.
_28th._--Steamed round to the other side of the island to the missionary station, carrying with us the trader and a young Irishman named Hicks; also a native woman and a boy. Here, to our surprise, we saw the vessel we had sighted and lost; she proved to be the _John Williams_.
We watched her plunging to and fro, now close under the cliffs, now skirting the _Janet_, now fetching our hearts in our mouths as she stayed, and forereached in staying, till you would have thought she had leaves on her jib-boom. We actually got up the camera to take a photograph of the expected shipwreck. We were told afterward that it was only Captain Turpie showing off his seamanship.
The _John Williams_ is a missionary ship on her way to Samoa with an English missionary and his family and a German lady who is going to open a school for Samoan girls. Mr. Lawes is the Nuieue missionary, a dark, foreign-looking man. We heard nothing but good of him from traders and natives.
We landed and climbed up the part path, part stairs of the cliff, our boys already trailing down it with copra sacks, the ship's boat slamming away at the jetty with a couple of black fellows holding on to it like grim death. The missionary natives were ranged in bodies on the path to meet us. First the men pressed forward, giggling, and shook hands; then the women, whose many-coloured garments we had remarked even from the ship, glowing on the cliff like a bank of flowers. The children who followed after pretended alarm and fled, but laughed as they ran. I was some distance from Louis, who has written the following in my diary[5] "They closed in on me like a sea; I was in the close embrace of half a dozen outstretched hands, with smiling faces all round me, and a perfect song of salutation going up. From the sirens I escaped by means of a present of tobacco, which was the cause of my ruin, later on, when Lloyd and I went out to photograph. A bevy of girls followed, hugging and embracing me, and going through my pockets. It was the nearest thing to an ugly sight, and still it was pretty; there was no jeering, no roughness, they fawned upon and robbed me like well-behaved and healthy children with a favourite uncle. My own cut tobacco and my papers they respected; but a little while after, on making a cigarette, I found my match-box gone. There was small doubt in my mind as to the culprit; a certain plump little maid, more like a Hawaiian, with a coquettish cast of face and carriage of the head, and conspicuous by a splendid red flower stuck in her ear, had visited me with a particular thoroughness. I demanded my matches. She shook her head at first; and then from some unknown receptacle produced my box, drew out a single match, replaced the box, and with a subtle smile and considerable grace of demeanour, something like a courtly hostess, passed me on the match!"