He was looking well.  Kohimarama must be more healthily situated than the first station, for all his three visits there were beneficial to him; and there seems to have been none of the tendency to ague and low fever which had been the trouble of the first abode.

Mr. Codrington and Mr. Bice came back in the schooner early in October, and were landed at Mota, while the Bishop went for a cruise in the New Hebrides; but the lateness of the season and the state of the vessel made it a short one, and he soon came back with thirty-five boys.  Meanwhile, a small harmonium, which was to be left with the Christian settlement, had caused such an excitement that Mr. Bice was nearly squeezed to death by the crowds that came to hear it.  He played nearly all day to successive throngs of men, but when the women arrived, they made such a clatter that he was fain to close the instrument.  Unbleached calico clothing had been made for such of the young ladies as were to be taken on board for Norfolk Island, cut out by the Bishop and made up by Robert, William, and Benjamin, his scholars; and Mr. Codrington says, ’It was an odd sight to see the Bishop on the beach with the group of girls round him, and a number of garments over his arm.  As each bride was brought by her friends, she was clothed and added to the group.

’Esthetically, clothes were no improvement.  “A Melanesian clothed,” the Bishop observes, “never looks well; there is almost always a stiff, shabby-genteel look.  A good specimen, not disfigured by sores and ulcers, the well-shaped form, the rich warm colour of the skin, and the easy, graceful play of every limb, unhurt by shoe or tight-fitting dress, the flower stuck naturally into the hair, &c., make them look pleasant enough to my eye.  You see in Picture Bibles figures draped as I could wish the Melanesians to be clothed."’

To continue Mr. Codrington’s recollections of this stay in Mota:—­

’I remember noticing how different his manner was from what was common at home.  His eyes were cast all about him, keeping a sharp look-out, and all his movements and tones were quick and decisive.  In that steaming climate, and those narrow paths, he walked faster than was at all agreeable to his companions, and was dressed moreover in a woollen coat and waistcoat all the time.  In fact, he thoroughly enjoyed the heat, though no doubt it was weakening him; he liked the food, which gave him no trouble at all to eat, and he liked the natives.

’He felt, of course, that he was doing his work all the while; but the expression of his countenance was very different while sitting with a party of men over their food at Mota, and when sitting with a party in Norfolk Island.

’The contrast struck me very much between his recluse studious life there, and his very active one at Mota, with almost no leisure to read, and very little to write, and with an abundance of society which was a pleasure instead of a burthen.