Lady Gordon has had large shelves made at one end of the drawing-room, on which are placed some of our finest specimens of pottery, and very handsome they are, of rich greenish yellow and red, glazed with resin. For anti-macassars and sofa-covers we have handsome white native cloth, with rich brown pattern. And instead of a carpet, one large cool mat, on one corner of which Jack and Nevil (and any of their grown-up friends whom they can entrap) build vast castles with large wooden bricks which have just been made here. The dining-room is now beautifully decorated with trophies of spears and clubs, and great bowls, and native cloth. The house is all so thoroughly in keeping with the country; so infinitely preferable to any attempt at making a Europeanised “Government House,” and so much more suitable to Sir Arthur’s _rôle_ of premier chief of Fiji. There are one or two minor points, however, on which we should be better pleased if our home was not so purely Fijian; if, for instance, it were not so very attractive to the crabs—a family which share all a Briton’s love for travelling and inspecting the homes of other races. Here they bravely leave their native shore, and walk inland, wherever fancy leads them; and this, I regret to say, is frequently into our bedrooms, where they find hiding-places in dark corners behind boxes and portfolios, whence at night they sally forth to make further researches, clattering their shell-armour against the woodwork, occasionally knocking down something which wakens us with a sudden start, and up we spring to find perhaps a great broad-backed chap like a “parten” brandishing his powerful claws within a few inches of our unprotected toes. Then follows an exciting chase—a regular game at hide-and-seek—which probably awakens some of our sleeping neighbours, greatly to their disgust. Of course it results in the capture of the intruder, but then comes the question what to do with him. I cannot bring myself to stab him with a spine of cocoa-nut leaf, as the Fijian girls do (piercing him beneath the main claw, which is his only vulnerable point); so I carry him down to the stream and throw him in, hoping he will travel back to the sea. I have had many such nocturnal adventures, and confess that I wish the inquisitive crabs would stay at home. Not that these are by any means the only members of the crab family which explore our abodes. Nowhere have I seen such a number of hermit-crabs as swarm on these isles, occupying every shell on the beach, from the least to the greatest. There are literally myriads of them, and sometimes the whole shore appears to be moving. But these errant hermits are by no means content to remain on the sea-beach,—they wander far up the valleys, and meet us in most unexpected places, carrying their borrowed homes with them; and we occasionally find them creeping up our mosquito-nets, and in other equally startling hiding-places.