Since the time of my two years residence in Fiji, great changes have come over the country. The prophecy of Hot-Water in regard to the acceptance of the new religion has been fully verified, and the islands have been given up to the rule of the white man. That this beautiful archipelago is destined to become a valuable British possession there can be no doubt. It is equally true that the native race is doomed to extinction, so that the words of the sable goddess of Vúya to her successful lover may be taken prophetically as the piteous wail of a people,
“Whose home at the dawn shall deserted be.”
The dawn for the new heroes is already falling on our eyes. For the aboriginal heroes it is the twilight of evening. They will pass, to be remembered only as an intelligent race of savages who wisely changed their religion, but foolishly sold their country. They will soon be seen paddling swiftly away in their own canoes, through the mists and shadows of their closing history,
“To the islands of the blessed,
To the kingdom of Ponemah,
To the land of the hereafter.”
But it is not with such thoughts that I prefer to think of Fiji and its people. Memory will always carry me back to the days when their many virtues and vices were their own, and a dignity of character was theirs which could not co-exist with the white settlements. I think of a land bright with flowers, and gay with the bloom of perpetual spring; of a little brown figure coquettishly braided with colored grasses, of her merry ways and words, of the delight I took in her simple stories of fairies and pixies, of the charm of her lithe form as she danced in the moonlight with her handmaidens, the fireflies like diamonds in her hair, while I was intoxicated with the beauty and wonder of the scene; of the ripple of a low laugh, of the musical sound of words that died in a caress; and of the fresh fragrance of sea and mountain wafted on cool winds in the land of malua, where the people sat, “every man under his vine and under his fig-tree,” and reaped the fruits of the earth almost without toil.
THE END.