[32] Editors and publishers (since those days we have been _déniaisés_ with a vengeance) had actually been inclined to shy at the terms of the fraudulent marriage contract, which is the pivot of the whole story; see below, p. 187.
[33] For a lively account of this plantation and its history, see Lord Pembroke's _South Sea Bubbles_, chap. i.
[34] The native wife of a carpenter in Apia.
[35] The sequel to _Kidnapped_, published in the following year under the title _Catriona_.
[36] Most of the work on the plantations in Samoa is done by "black boys," _i.e._ imported labourers from other (Melanesian) islands.
[38] In answer to the obvious remark that the length and style of _The Wrecker_, then running in Scribner's Magazine, were out of keeping with what professed at the outset to be a spoken yarn.
[39] Of Ballantrae: the story is the unfinished _Young Chevalier_.
[40] Afterwards changed into _The Ebb Tide_.
[41] Wordsworth's _Ode to Duty_, a shade misquoted.
[42] "Kava, properly Ava, is a drink more or less intoxicating, made from the root of the _Piper Methysticum_, a Pepper plant. The root is grated: formerly it was chewed by fair damsels. The root thus broken up is rubbed about in a great pail, with water slowly added. A strainer of bark cloth is plunged into it at times, and wrung out so as to carry away the small fragments of root. The drink is made and used in ceremony. Every detail is regulated by rules, and the manner of the mixture of the water, the straining, the handling of the cup, the drinking out of it and returning, should all be done according to a well-established manner and in certain cadences." I borrow this explanation from the late Mr. Lafarge's notes to his catalogue of South Sea Drawings. It may serve to make clearer several passages in later letters of the present collection. Readers of the late Lord Pembroke's _South Sea Bubbles_ will remember the account of this beverage and its preparation in Chap. viii. of that volume.
[43] Referring to the marriage contract in the _Beach of Falesá:_ see above, p. 152.
[44] This about the consulship was only a passing notion on the part of R. L. S. No vacancy occurred, and in his correspondence he does not recur to the subject.