At one plantation we found an unpleasant instance of a state of things common enough hitherto, but now happily becoming impossible, as fast as the new order of law can make it so: A plantation worked by foreign labour, who declare that they were all kidnapped under circumstances of varied brutality, from the isles of Santo, Solomon, &c., and who have been illegally detained here for six years without receiving any pay. (The law provides for their being sent home after three years, with full pay.) Now an additional six months have slipped away, during which they have been detained, week by week, buoyed up by vain promises, and seeing men on neighbouring estates receiving a shilling a-week for every week they are detained, waiting for a ship to take them home. Naturally they are savage and sullen by turns, and repeatedly threaten the life of the young man left in charge of the estate, in the absence of the principal. He tells them that if they kill him they will be hanged for murder; but they say they would just as soon be hanged as live on in slavery. One says he left his wife and six children the morning he went with his best pig to trade with the great ship; some say their canoes were smashed by heavy weights dropped from the ship, which left them helpless and at the mercy(!) of the white men; others say they were inveigled on board to see machinery and other strange sights, and when they came on deck the land lay miles behind them. Some weeks ago one of them threw a spear at the young overseer. It was caught and checked by another man; but on his threatening the culprit with a licking, the whole body rose _en masse_, and in the dead of night came and took possession of his verandah, where he heard them all night consulting whether to kill him or not. Just before our arrival, two men rushed at him with knives, and he had just time to retreat to his house and snatch up an (unloaded) revolver, whereupon they retired. Now he has pacified them for the moment by distributing _sulus_, off a bale of cloth sent up by his employer to barter for _coppra_ (the men were literally naked); and he further promises to take a number of them to Levuka next week to tell their own story to the immigration agent. Do not such cases as these suggest plainly enough what deep wrongs to be avenged have led to such grievous results as the murder of Commodore Goodenough or Bishop Patteson? Even with respect to the Fijians, I am sorry to say that the _niceness_ of the natives depends greatly on how _few_ whites they see. The inhabitants of the isles frequented by whites are immeasurably inferior to those in more remote districts, and far less trustworthy.