When we had drawn up a case to be submitted to Sir John Young, at Sydney, our captain made a commercial treaty with the magistrate, who agreed to supply the ships of the new line, whenever daylight allowed them to call at Pitcairn, with oranges, bananas, ducks, and fowls, for which he was to receive cloth and tobacco in exchange, tobacco being the money of the Polynesian Archipelago. Mr. Young told us that his people had thirty sheep, which were owned by each of the families in turn, the household taking care of them, and receiving the profits for one year. Water, he said, sometimes falls short in the island, but they then make use of the juice of the green cocoa-nut. Their school is excellent; all the children can read and write, and in the election of magistrates they have female suffrage. When we went on deck again to talk to the younger men, Adams asked us a new question: “Have you a _Sunday at Home_, or a _British Workman_?” Our books and papers having been ransacked, Moses Young prepared to leave the ship, taking with him presents from the stores. Besides the cloth, tobacco, hats, and linen, there was a bottle of brandy; given for medicine, as the islanders are strict teetotalers. While Young held the bottle in his hand, afraid to trust the lads with it, Adams read the label and cried out, “Brandy? How much for a dose?.... Oh, yes! all right--I know: it‘s good for the women!” When they at last left the ship‘s side, one of the canoes was filled with a crinoline and blue silk dress for Mrs. Young, and another with a red and brown tartan for Mrs. Adams, both given by lady passengers, while the lads went ashore in dust-coats and smoking-caps. Now that the French, with their singular habit of everywhere annexing countries which other colonizing nations have rejected, are rapidly occupying all the Polynesian groups except the only ones that are of value--namely, the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand--Pitcairn becomes of some interest as a solitary British post on the very border of the French dominions, and it has for us the stronger claim to notice which is raised by the fact that it has figured for the last few years on the wrong side of our British budget. As we stood out from the bay into the lonely seas, the island peak showed a black outline against a pale-green sky, but in the west the heavy clouds that in the Pacific never fail to cumber the horizon were glowing with a crimson cast by the now-set sun, and the dancing wavelets were tinted with reflected hues.