H.M.S. Barracouta has just come into harbour, and Captain Stevens dined here last night. He unfortunately got mixed in the Samoan difficulties, and has brought Colonel Steinberger here as a prisoner, which is rather embarrassing. A few days ago a barque arrived here from Samoa, bringing eight wounded sailors belonging to the Barracouta. They got into an apparently senseless row with the natives, in which three blue-jackets were killed. Doubtless this will involve some further complication. CHAPTER XVI. GOOD FRIDAY IN FIJI—ISLE KORO—PLANTERS’ HOUSES—LABOUR—MAKING NATIVE CLOTH—GREAT FEASTS—WEDDINGS—SALARIES OF WESLEYAN MISSIONARIES AND TEACHERS. NAMATHU, ISLE OF KORO, _Good Friday, 1876_. DEAR NELL,—It is raining heavily, and the wind is foul, and the Jubilee has had to run to safer anchorage, otherwise we were to have started this afternoon, to spend Easter on another island. I cannot say I regret the detention, as our surroundings here are pleasant and peaceful, and it is time I sent you a report of my wanderings. This day last year we were all in Paris, and spent the whole day in solemn crowded churches—La Madelaine and St Roch,—and at the latter, after the office of Les Ténébres, I followed the stream of people into the small dark chapel of the Entombment, where the sole ray of light falls on the sepulchre, and on the strangely lifelike groups of sculpture on either side, representing the Crucifixion and the Entombment, all the figures life-size. A most impressive scene. Very different are our surroundings to-day, housed in a large cool native house, the home of Isaaki, a fine old native minister, who has charge of this beautiful island. It is an unusually nice house, having actually two distinct rooms, so it is an easy matter to partition the inner one, and thus we each have a really cosy little nest, which is the more agreeable as this place is an important centre, and we have been here for five days. Wonderful to tell, the house has wooden doors, but it is a strange thing in a country so richly wooded as this to see that, owing to the scarcity of planks, all the doors are made of old, battered, and worm-eaten canoes; so also are the bridges, in those rare cases where anything is provided more elaborate than the slippery stem of a cocoa-palm. Stranger still is it to hear that in many of these beautiful isles stone is so rare that, when some time ago a white settler had procured a sandstone slab to place on a grave, the people came from miles round to sharpen their knives on it! The principal charm of this house is that it stands a little way apart from the village, on a quiet coral shore, close by the sea, with palms and other trees round it, and in this respect is a perfect paradise compared with some places, where our night quarters have been in some stuffy overcrowded house, in the very heart of the village.