"So effective were the means employed by the Hili-lites to prevent future raids, that, though the inhabitants of these islands had again increased, probably to a million or more, no second invasion had ever been attempted by even the strongest and bravest of their savage chiefs." "Well," I said, as Bainbridge paused, and seemed to be thinking just what to say next, "what of the beautiful Lilama and the infatuated Ahpilus? I hope poor Pym is not to have so charming a love-feast broken into by any untoward event. I must say, Bainbridge, those Hili-lites were wonderfully careless of their loveliest women--of a beautiful girl of sixteen, and so close to royalty itself." "Well, my cold-blooded friend, what will you say when I tell you that Lilama was an orphan, and had inherited from her father the only island in the archipelago upon which precious stones were found, and that even in that strange land she was wealthier than the king? Had she been able to get the products of her islands into the markets of the world, she would have been wealthier than Croesus, the Count of Monte Cristo and the Rothschilds, all combined. However, in Hili-li, wealth was not--well, not an all-powerful factor; important, but not having the power which in the remainder of the civilized world it possesses. To have power, money must be able to purchase human labor or its products, as only by human power is all other force utilized. In Hili-li, a citizen possessed everything that he required for his ordinary wants, and it was almost impossible to purchase the leisure time of any man. It was possible on certain conditions to procure human labor, but it was extremely difficult to do so. Then, for seven or eight hundred years slavery had been prohibited in the land, all existing slaves having been emancipated--after which, in the course of a few generations, Hili-lian history says, the slaves and the slave-spirit were lost in the mass of the population.