by the noises of the festival, renewed their efforts to escape.  But all was vain; right across the door lay that god-fearing householder, Paaaeua, feigning sleep; and my friends had to forego their junketing.  In this incident, so delightfully European, we thought we could detect three strands of sentiment.  In the first place, Paaaeua had a charge of souls:  these were young men, and he judged it right to withhold them from the primrose path.  Secondly, he was a public character, and it was not fitting that his guests should countenance a festival of which he disapproved.  So might some strict clergyman at home address a worldly visitor:  ’Go to the theatre if you like, but, by your leave, not from my house!’ Thirdly, Paaaeua was a man jealous, and with some cause (as shall be shown) for jealousy; and the feasters were the satellites of his immediate rival, Moipu.

For the adoption had caused much excitement in the village; it made the strangers popular.  Paaaeua, in his difficult posture of appointed chief, drew strength and dignity from their alliance, and only Moipu and his followers were malcontent.  For some reason nobody (except myself) appears to dislike Moipu.  Captain Hart, who has been robbed and threatened by him; Father Orens, whom he has fired at, and repeatedly driven to the woods; my own family, and even the French officials—­all seemed smitten with an irrepressible affection for the man.  His fall had been made soft; his son, upon his death, was to succeed Paaaeua in the chieftaincy; and he lived, at the time of our visit, in the shoreward part of the village in a good house, and with a strong following of young men, his late braves and pot-hunters.  In this society, the coming of the Casco, the adoption, the return feast on board, and the presents exchanged between the whites and their new parents, were doubtless eagerly and bitterly canvassed.  It was felt that a few years ago the honours would have gone elsewhere.  In this unwonted business, in this reception of some hitherto undreamed-of and outlandish potentate—­some Prester John or old Assaracus—­a few years back it would have been the part of Moipu to play the hero and the host, and his young men would have accompanied and adorned the various celebrations as the acknowledged leaders of society.  And now, by a malign vicissitude of fortune, Moipu must sit in his house quite unobserved; and his young men could but look in at the door while their rivals feasted.  Perhaps M. Grevy felt a touch of bitterness towards his successor when he beheld him figure on the broad stage of the centenary of eighty-nine; the visit of the Casco which Moipu had missed by so few years was a more unusual occasion in Atuona than a centenary in France; and the dethroned chief determined to reassert himself in the public eye.