"On the following morning the wind had died down to a moderate gale, and we could venture out. The picture that presented itself cannot possibly be described with anything like vividness. Cocoanut and bread-fruit trees by the thousand had been thrown down or stripped of their leaves; banana-plants were in the same condition; the grass was levelled, and covered with mud and water, and not a house in the neighborhood remained standing. In the cotton-fields not only were the leaves and bolls stripped from the plants, but in many places the plants had been torn up by the roots and lay in heaps. In Levuka many houses were blown down; vessels were driven ashore, or broken to pieces at their moorings; and the whole windward coast of the islands was strewn with wrecks. Many foreign vessels that were known to be in Feejee waters, or near the islands, were never heard of again, and they doubtless went down on that terrible night. At Macuata, on Vanua Levu, the wind lifted a small vessel bodily from the beach and blew it into a native village two or three hundred yards away!"
COAST SCENE IN A CALM.
The story of the hurricane led to various anecdotes of the South Seas, and in this way the afternoon was passed until dinner-time. One man told how a ship on which he once sailed was driven before a hurricane and thrown upon a reef, where the waves dashed her to pieces. He was carried into the comparatively smooth lagoon inside the reef, and saved himself by swimming, all his companions being drowned. Fortunately for him, the islanders among whom he landed were not cannibals, or he would have been condemned at once to the oven. The cannibals of the South Pacific have always regarded people shipwrecked on their shores as special gifts or windfalls, just as the inhabitants of certain parts of the coast of the United States are said to have regarded the cargoes of wrecked ships less than a century ago. Of course he taught the natives many useful things, and eventually married the daughter of the chief, and became a chief himself when his father-in-law died.
LOST IN THE HURRICANE.
Another man, who claimed to have visited half the islands of the Pacific, endeavored to prove his assertion by asking our friends to step inside for a few moments, where he removed his clothing and exhibited samples of the tattooing of pretty nearly every group. "That clouded pattern on my left leg," said he, "was done in the Kingsmill group, while those squares and fancy stripes on the right leg were put on in Samoa. My right arm and shoulder were done in the New Hebrides, while the left side was the work of the best artist of the Marquesas Islands. The fancy embroidery on my breast is of New Zealand, and that down my back was done in Tahiti."