The story of this heart is the one shocking page in this history: some children discovered it afterward, and, thinking it the offal of an animal, devoured it. Whoever affirms that the "Sandwich-Islanders eat each other," has at least this ground for his affirmation. Natives of the South Sea Islands have been driven as far north as this in their frail canoes. They were cannibals, and no doubt were hungry, and may have eaten in their fashion, but it is said to have been an acquired taste, and was not at all popular in this region. Dramatic justice required some tragic sort of revenge, and this was surely equal to the emergency.

Our advance guard, in the shape of a month-earlier tourist, gave us the notes for doing this historical nook in the Pacific. A turned-down page, it is perhaps a little too dog-eared to be read over again, but we all like to compare notes. So we noted the items of the advance guard, and they read in this fashion:—

OBJECTS OF INTEREST RELATING TO CAPTAIN COOK.

ItemI.The tree where Cook was struck.
"II.The rock where Cook fell.
"III.The altar on the hill-top.
"IV.The riven palms.
"V.The sole survivor,—the boy that ran.
"VI.A specimen sepulchre in the cliff.

Until dark the native children have been playing about us in the sea, diving for very smooth "rials," and looking much as frogs must look to wandering lilliputians. The artist cares less for these wild and graceful creatures than one would suppose, for he confesses them equal in physical beauty to the Italian models. All sentiment seemed to have been dragged out of him by much travel. At night we sit together on the threshold of our grass house, and not twenty feet from the rock—under water only at high tide—where Cook died. We sit talking far into the night, with the impressive silence broken only by the plash of the sea at our very door.

By and by the moon looks down upon us from the sepulchre of the kings. We are half clad, having adopted the native costume as the twilight deepened and our modesty permitted. The heat is still excessive. All this low land was made to God's order some few centuries ago. We wonder if He ever changes his mind; this came down red-hot from the hills yonder, and cooled at high-water mark. It holds the heat like an oven-brick, and we find it almost impossible to walk upon it at noontime, even our sole-leather barely preserving our feet from its blistering surface. The natives manage to hop over it now and then; they are about half leather, anyhow, and the other half appetite.

We come first upon No. II. in the list of historic haunts.

Let us pass down to the rock, and cool ourselves in the damp moss that drapes it. It is almost as large as a dinner-table, and as level. You can wade all around it, count a hundred little crabs running up and down over the top of it. So much for one object of interest, and the artist draws his pencil through it. At ten, P. M., we are still chatting, and have added a hissing pot of coffee over some live coals to our housekeeping. Now down a little pathway at our right comes a native woman, with a plump and tough sort of pillow under each arm. These she implores us to receive and be comfortable. We refuse to be comforted in this fashion, we despise luxuries, and in true cosmopolitan independence hang our heads over our new saddle-trees, and sleep heavily in an atmosphere rank with the odor of fresh leather; but not till we have seen our humane visitor part of the way home. Back by the steep and winding path we three pass in silence. She pauses a moment in the moonlight at what seems a hitching-post cased in copper. It is as high as our hip, and has some rude lettering apparently scratched with a nail upon it. We decipher with some difficulty this legend:—

+
Near this spot
fell
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, R. N.,
the
Renowned Circumnavigator,
who
discovered these islands,
A. D. 1778.
His Majesty's Ship
Imogene,
Oct. 17, 1837.