But Emma was no longer there to greet the crew of the Norval that evening when they hurried ashore. They learned with dismay that she had sold the hotel to a roving New Zealander, Thomas Bell. Thus it was that a stranger gave them a dour and unenthusiastic greeting, a man who had tried unsuccessfully to open a Pacific trading station, and had come to Apia and bought Emma Farrell's hotel instead. The move had brought him no happiness, and he had spent the better part of the year regretting it.

The babel of voices rose and fell in the crowded barroom. In addition to the crew of the Norval, there were men of all types thronging the room, bearded German traders, copra growers, stranded seamen, deserters and derelict beachcombers, and shifty-eyed rats of men who might have been partners in some infamous slave-trading racket that would take unsuspecting islanders from their homes and dump them down to toil and die on the plantations and in the silver mines of Peru.

Kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling flickered and flared in drifting clouds of rank tobacco smoke. There was a heavy reek of raw, strong spirits in the humid air and a bedlam of rough voices.

Presently there came a lull, and a powerfully built, bearded man approaching middle age, made his way to a table where Chris Johnston sat alone beside an open window.

"Busy night, Tom," greeted the latter. "I was wondering if you'd have time to come and join me. Help yourself." He pushed the bottle across the table. Tom Bell poured himself a drink and stared moodily out into the night. Through the window came the steady roar of surf out on the reef; the fronds of the palms outside rattled in a faint breeze, and tropical stars blazed in a velvet-black sky.

"I hear you're thinking of selling out," said Bell's companion presently. "Is it true?"

glamorous picture of Sunday Island. To be Queen of the Kermadecs certainly did not come within the scope of her modest earthly ambitions, which were centred solely on the welfare of her husband and of her six young children.

One thing she knew beyond all doubt, however, was that she herself was in for a hard time! This did not trouble her. She had faced hard times before, and was no stranger to loneliness and the ups-and-downs of a roving life. Strange indeed, she reflected, had been the path life had laid down for her since she had left London after an unhappy girlhood, and come to the little town of Napier, capital of Hawke's Bay, soon after the outbreak of the Maori War. Here she had met and married Thomas Bell, who had been fighting with the British troops.

It was during the confused and dangerous period of the Hau Hau uprising that Bell had suffered a serious setback, the burning of his flax mill at Nuhaka, in Hawke's Bay. This mill was one of the first in New Zealand, and the loss of his entire stock of fine dressed flax before he could ship any of it overseas so discouraged him that he presently gave up all idea of industrial pioneering and decided to go in for hotel-keeping.

After one or two more or less successful ventures, he made up his mind to buy a hotel at Ohiwa, a little seaside settlement in the Bay of Plenty. Thinking it might be a good idea to take his wife to see the place before settling the matter, he arranged for her to make the long trip with him from their home in Kaitaratah, a village not far from Gisborne, Hawke's Bay.

Leaving her children in the care of kindly neighbours, Frederica Bell, who had never sat a horse before, started out on an epic ride through some of the wildest, roughest country in New Zealand. Across one high mountain range after another, through forest-clad ravines, over precipitous Maori tracks so narrow that it was necessary always to ride single file, Tom Bell and his wife made their way through the Motu Gorge by a route famed even in those days for its beauty and feared for its perils. Frederica Bell was actually the first white woman ever to make the forbidding journey. Week after week she and her husband pressed on, sleeping often beneath the stars or in some wayside Maori whare (hut).

At last the long ride came to an end. Bell bought the hotel, but a few years later, decided he had had enough of New Zealand life. A trading station in the Pacific, he considered, would be better suited to a man of his energy and ambition.

To his bitter disappointment, he found that Germany had already placed her traders in every important island group in the Pacific, from the Carolines far westward to New Guinea and New Britain.

And so at last he had drifted with his family to Western Samoa, then under joint British, American and German control, where ownership of the Samoa Hotel in Apia had been the best he could achieve. A year of that had been enough for him, and a year too long for his wife. Still a Londoner at heart, she did not understand, nor like, the Samoans, nor did she feel happy in the come-day, go-day, God-send-Sunday atmosphere of this lax, lush little tropical seaport.

. As she sat hour by hour in a shady nook on the deck of the Norval and nursed her latest baby, one-year-old Jackie, she felt very glad her days in Samoa were over. The wind remained fair, the weather perfect. Lulled by the gentle movement of the ship, and the song of the sea-breeze in the sails, she relaxed as she had not done for many a long day, stretched her bare feet to a sun which no longer blazed in tropical heat, and smoked a well-seasoned clay pipe. Strangers were usually taken aback at the sight of this gentle-faced woman puffing away like a Maori wahine (woman), but she had picked up the habit while living among them during the wandering years, and had fallen under its persuasive spell.

Trailing masses of rose-pink convolvulus tangled the children's feet as they crossed the sandbanks, and they cried out in delight to find wide stretches of ground on the other side massed with mauve ageratum, acre upon acre of fluffy, sweet-smelling flowers.

It was here, on the only piece of level ground on the western side of the island, that almost every party of early settlers had made their homes, close to the lagoon which provided the only readily accessible supply of fresh water on the island.

"We'll camp here," said Thomas Bell, who had been reconnoitring. "You youngsters come and help carry up some of the stores, and mother will get us some lunch."

They went off to the head of the beach. Frederica Bell lit a fire and set up her camp oven, a large iron pot with a close-fitting flat cover, on which live embers were laid when the fire beneath died down to a glowing mass. This was the way every pioneer mother in New Zealand cooked in the early days; right well it baked bread, roasted, fried and broiled meat and vegetables.

Her husband returned with several large tins and dumped them on the ground. "Open a tin of flour, Tom," she said, "and I'll make a batch of scones for lunch."

The tin was opened. It contained nothing but a hard blue lump of mould.

"Open another tin." Mrs. Bell tried to keep her voice steady.

The contents of the second tin were in the same condition, also the third.

"We'll have a look at the cabin bread," said Bell tensely.

It contained nothing but a mass of crumbs and weevils. Other tins were opened. Everything was in the same condition.

The Bells stared at the tins in deep dismay as they were brought face to face with the grim fact that the entire stock of foodstuffs bought from McKenzie was unfit to eat. All too obviously it had lain in the hold of the Norval during many trips to tropical island stations, until the Bells had come along and McKenzie had been able to off-load it to an unfortunate family making their way to an uninhabited island.

Even Frederica Bell's strong spirit quailed; her husband, almost blind with fury, stamped on the ground and flung his arms wide.

A man of strong temper, he seldom lost control and swore, but when he did, he knew what to say.

"The low-down scoundrel!" he shouted. "The——!"

"Not here, Tom," interrupted his wife. "Go down to the beach."

He turned furiously, and went. Gradually his shouts died away in the distance.

The Bell's first meal on Sunday Island consisted of a packet of sandwiches and biscuits packed for the children by the NorvaVs cook. A few scraps were saved for the hungry terrier and her pups.

After lunch Bell unpacked his fishing line, baited the hook hopefully with a scrap of meat saved from a sandwich, and went down to the beach. But the sea had risen under a gusty wind, and heavy waves were breaking on the rocks in a smother of foam and spray. Fishing was out of the question.

The Bells' dinner that evening consisted of fried limpets which Hettie and Bess had knocked from the rocks, the remains of the sandwiches, an orange, a chocolate biscuit apiece, and a drink of water from the lagoon. During the afternoon the children had gathered piles of dried grass and leaves from the nikau palms, which were spread on the warm earth to serve as beds. At sunset Tom Bell returned from a final inspection of his household belongings still unopened on the sandhills, and sat down with his family beneath the trees.

"Now mother," he said quietly, "the Book."

From her carpet bag his wife brought out the worn

"I think I'd better go up the cliffs and see if I can get a goat," said Bell, after pitching a couple of tents which were to be the family's quarters until a hut was built. "Bess and Hettie can come with me later on, but for the present they'll have to cut raupo (swamp reeds) and nikau leaves for the hut."

Taking the girls down to the swamp, he gave each a strong knife, and set them to work cutting the tall, spear-shaped leaves. They already knew how to handle the nikau palms for they were the same as those growing in New Zealand forests. First a deep cut down the swelling bole, then the stripping one by one of the long, branching leaves, until only the thick white stalk of the tight-folded heart leaves remained. These made good eating, crisp and delicately flavoured, and when cooked, tasted like heart of celery. Many a time in the days that followed, the nikau saved the family from the worst pangs of hunger.

Late in the afternoon, Bell returned from the mountains empty-handed.

"It's no use," he told his wife. "I must have the dog to round them up, and I'll need the girls too, to stop the animals from jumping over the cliffs."

But the little black-and-tan terrier Patsy had chased a wild cat into the forest and lost herself. When she came back, days later, more dead than alive, three of the pups had died. Frederica Bell managed somehow to keep the remaining one alive, but it was some time before Patsy recovered sufficiently to take part in the goat-hunting.

During the days that followed the landing, Bell worked with the strength of two men, and tried to make his young daughters work to the same pattern. His iron determination, strengthened to near-desperation by the loss of their food supplies, drove him to the limit "of his own physical endurance. Inured to hardship by long years of rigorous living, he took little heed of the fact that the girls were only growing children, now deprived of the food necessary to build up vitality after each day's loss.

A sudden daring thought flashed into Hettie's active brain.

"Bess! Wouldn't it be fun to go and sleep in The Oven? Are you on?

"What for?" Bess was feeling tired, and quite ready to call it a day.

"Fun, of course, silly! It would be lovely in there. We might never get the chance again. Oh, come on, Bess. We'll get up as soon as it's light and come back here."

"What would mother say? And wouldn't father just make a row."

"We wouldn't need to tell a soul. We'll keep it as our own secret and not tell Mary or anybody."

That did it. Bess loved secrets with all a nine-year-old's love of the importance of knowing something unknown to others. She jumped to her feet. "All right! Let's go! We'll have to hurry to get there before dark."

Snatching up their sleeping coats they dashed off. Now that the warmth of day had passed, the steam was curling thickly into the rapidly cooling air. "It'll be lovely and warm in The Oven," said Hettie, as they crept through the narrow opening. They groped their way into the darkness inside, tucked themselves up in their coats and lay down on the warm, steamy earth.

Neither reminded the other of the evening prayer, but presently Bess rather self-consciously started a verse of their hymn. But it sounded out of place in that dark hole, and the singing ceased abruptly before they got to the angels keeping watch about their heads. It didn't seem quite the thing, somehow, to drag their heavenly guardians into an unauthorized spree of this kind, particularly with such a horrible sulphurous smell coming up through the floor.

The night outside grew very still. The girls stopped talking and listened to a peculiar thumping and rumbling, and a sound like water bubbling and boiling deep down in some subterranean stokehole.

"And we can't read what it says!" Hettie's voice was tragic. "Bess, we'll just have to learn! Come on, we'll take it home to mother."

And mother read aloud:

SACRED

To the Memory of

Fleetwood James Denham

The dearly beloved son of Henry Mangles

Denham, Captain of Her Britannic Majesty's

ship HERALD, and Isabella Denham.

He died aboard the Herald at this Island on the 8th day of July, 1854, aged 16 years, leaving an afflicted parent to mourn his loss here, and many at home who dearly loved him.

This tablet is erected by his bereaved father

and shipmates, as a last testimony of their

esteem.

SUNDAY ISLAND

South Pacific

July 9, 1854

"The poor lad! And his poor father, having to go away and leave his boy buried here on this lonely, lonely island." The note of sadness in their mother's voice impressed the children even more than the reading of the inscription.

When her husband returned from fishing, they all walked down to the grave again.

"So it was the poor lad's grave after all," he said. "It must have been a terrific storm that swept the plaque down to the ti-tree. It's all of a hundred feet away! Well, I'm glad we found it. I'll make a new cross, and as soon as we can grow some flowers, we'll plant something on the grave."The cross was made, the plaque affixed. There it stood until Sunday Island was once again deserted. A requiem of wind and wave sounded over the grave for many years. Cross and plaque finally disappeared. The Denham grave is now marked only by a row of stones.

After a couple of days, the coverings were removed from the hangi and the ti'-roots unwrapped. To the delight of all, the tough slabs had been transformed into sugary strips. These were dried in the sun and then boiled down to a thick golden syrup. But the sweet-starved children could not wait for the boiling down. They seized the sugar strips, and but for their mother's ever-watchful eye, would have soon gorged themselves sick.

After that there was always sweetening for Mrs. Bell's cooking and no lack of a wholesome sweetmeat for the children.

The boiling down of the ti'-root was attended by an accident that came near to tragedy. While the mother's back was turned for a moment, young Harry knocked over a pot full of the scalding syrup, some of which splashed over his bare legs. He screamed with pain as great blisters formed. Mrs. Bell rushed to her first-aid box, and smeared the burns thickly with a homemade ointment she had brought from New Zealand made from broad-leafed plantain, marshmallow and lard. She had used nothing else for the healing of the cuts, scratches and blisters suffered by her bare-footed brood since they had come to Sunday Island. Harry's sobs ceased as the pain was allayed. The blisters did not break, and in a miraculously short time the burns were healed, leaving no trace of a scar.

Towards the end of January 1879, when the family had been on the island nearly two months, Tom Bell went one morning to look at his garden. To his amazement and utter dismay, he found it a wreck. Every vestige of his young plants had disappeared. The rows of freshly-dug earth, in which he had planted maize, pumpkin seed and beans the day before, were pitted from end to end with small holes from which every seed had been taken. A couple of maize cobs he had left lying at the end of a row had been picked clean of every grain.

He took one into the hut and showed it to his wife. "Rats! The garden's a complete wreck" he said grimly.

The Bells had been hoping against hope that the all-too-well-known Sunday Island scourge might have lifted after the last party of settlers had left. It had not. The rats came in their hundreds and their thousands, a small, peculiarly voracious, cereal-eating type of animal, impudent and ugly.

Every scrap of food prepared by Mrs. Bell in her outside camp oven and pots now had to be carried into the hut immediately and stored away. Fortunately the rats did not come inside. But the damage they did outside almost broke Tom Bell's heart. It was as if the curse of another Bishop Hatto lay over the Bay, which even a Pied Piper would have found hard to lift.

Man, woman, children, and terrier, they fought the scourge by every means in their power. Bell set arsenic-poisoned maize. The rats died by the score, but for every one that died there came a horde of avenging relatives, and they died also. But still they came.

The children found a ship's rusty old mooring-buoy and turned it into a giant trap by the ingenious method of placing half a dozen smelling-to-heaven fish heads and scraps of goat offal in the bottom of the buoy, which was rolled into position beneath a shrub. Two or three young branches were stripped of their leaves and bent half-way down inside.

As soon as the rats got a whiff of the nauseating bait, they came swarming and scampering up the shrub, down the bent branch, and then dropped off into the bottom of the trap to enjoy the best-and the last-feast of their lives.

"A few dozen of those, and we'll have the hut as bright as a lighthouse!" he declared. "Take a basket, Mary, and you and Tom see if you can find some more."

The children raced off happily. What with the sugar tree, the copper plaque, the rat-catchings, and now the candlenuts, life on this emprisoning island was brightening.

Unfortunately the supply of nuts soon gave out. They stripped the tree they had found, but although they searched diligently day after day, could find no more.

"All right! We'll have to make some pot-lights." Tom Bell, as ever, hated to give in.

The children brought him a treasured hoard of small empty tins, which he half-filled with clay. A loop of wire was pushed down into the clay, with a wisp of cotton rag threaded through for a wick. The tin was then filled with mutton-bird oil, and the lighting problem was solved. The illumination could perhaps have been more accurately gauged by lighted-match-power than by candle-power, but it was at least a light. Half a dozen of the little pots glimmering from odd corners of the room gave it a cheerful, even if rather a glow-wormy, appearance.

Taking heart from these discoveries, Mrs. Bell began to get ideas. A certain Swiss Family Robinson touch was beginning to creep into their barren lives.

"You know, Tom, I think this hut would look all the better if we had some nice goat rugs on the floor," she remarked one morning. "There's a big pile of them down in the tool-shed. I'd like to cure some. Didn't you say there was an alum cave somewhere up there in the crater?"

"Tons of it!" exclaimed Hettie. "Oh father, please can Bess and I go up and get some for mother?"

"Anything to get out of digging that garden," grumbled their father irritably. Then, seeing their disappointment, he relented. "Oh all right. Ask your mother!"

"Can they go up by themselves?"

"They ought to know the way by now! Yes, they'll be all right. Take a couple of sacks and see you don't get into mischief." He strode out.

"Nothing to get into," muttered young Hettie. "I wish there were!"

"Any more of that, miss, and you stay at home!" admonished their mother, who kept a strict hand on all her children. No rough speaking or answering back was tolerated by either parent. Immediate obedience and respect were exacted and given.

"Yes mother - I mean no, mother," apologised Hettie meekly.

"That's a good girl. Now go and get your sacks and something to gather the alum up with, while I put you up some lunch."

"Thank you, mother. We'll bring you back heaps and heaps. Goodbye."

A dutiful kiss, a backward look and a wave, and they were off up the track. They reached the cave after a breathless climb, and found the floor piled with mounds of the crumbly white stuff. They scraped it industriously into their sacks, had a swim in the crater lake and returned happily at sunset with enough alum to cure every goatskin in the Bay.

A little later each room in the hut had pure white, glove-soft rugs on the floor. There were no black goats on the island, and few with even fawn markings. The hut began to look very cosy and homelike indeed.

"How long now, mother?" asked Tom Bell one evening as his wife finished writing up her diary. She turned back the pages. "Let me see—McKenzie said three months. This is February 26th—he ought to be here about the middle of March. It won't be long now, Tom."

"Won't I have a few things to say to the——"

"Now, don't start that all over again for goodness sake. I keep on telling you, he might not have known anything about the stuff being bad.""The rascal knew enough to get hold of my good money and clear out before we had a chance of finding out."

"Now look, Tom! You've done nothing but grumble about the stuff the whole time we've been on the island. You take my advice, and don't start making a fuss the moment McKenzie shows up. If you want to have it out with him, wait until he's put our goods ashore. What would you do if he got the huff and took the whole lot round to North Beach and landed them there just for spite?"

The appalling thought struck her husband completely dumb. He blew out the pot-light and got into bed without another word.

As the time for the return of the Norval approached, the children took turns with their mother at keeping watch up at the lookout. Day after day the vigil continued. The days lengthened into a week, one week into two. At last March had gone and they were into April. And still no sign of the ship. Each morning hope sprang to life and died at night.

Summer passed imperceptibly into autumn without a glimpse of ship or sail. They had been deserted as well as cheated. Tom Bell, never a talker, became more silent and morose than ever.

Bravely his wife maintained her faith in God, reading her evening chapter in her usual steady voice, and Bell did his best to keep some of his unhappiness out of his own voice as he led his family in the Lord's Prayer.

The children continued to sing their evening hymn as heartily as ever. After all, their mother had told them that God looked after everybody, even if they sometimes had to wait and keep on praying before He stretched out His Hand. They believed her implicitly. The strength and comfort of this early teaching was to come to the aid of

"Put it out of your mind," was her husband's terse reply. "A ship's no more likely to come today or tomorrow than it was yesterday or last week or last month."

Fighting back the sad reflection that Captain Sherman's promise had actually amounted to no more than McKenzie's, Mrs. Bell pushed on, with little Jackie strapped closely to her back in a shawl, Maori pickanniny fashion.

The journey from Denham Bay to the North Side was never easy. Years later, when a rough sheep-track had been formed, it could be made in a couple of hours, but now it took a good half day. Sunday Island distances were never to be measured by the mile, but by the time it took to cover them. Not only were there ravines and ridges to cross, hills to climb and descend, but fallen logs to crawl over, vines to cut back, broken branches and storm debris through which to force a way.

Early afternoon brought to them presently the muted thunder of surf breaking on North Beach. They came at last within view of the long Pacific rollers, riding in majestically in ruler-straight lines, one behind the other, to crash in clouds of spray on the beach.

They camped that night on one of the grassy flats reaching inward from the seashore. All next day they roamed happily on the terraces, on the sandhills, and round North Beach towards a shelf of rocks that thrust far out from the foot of the cliffs into the breakers.

"That'll be the landing for ships' boats when the surf's too heavy on the beach," remarked Bell, watching the waves as they climbed the ledge in a powerful surge and swept back in a mass of foam and broken water.

"Landing place!" echoed Mrs. Bell with a shudder. "It looks simply awful. Fancy if you missed your footing and were swept out to sea."

Bell laughed. "Nothing to be scared of. All you'd have to do would be to dive and swim out and come in again on the next breaker." 81

"Oh Bess! What fun!" said Hettie.

"We'll try it some day," agreed Bess with sparkling eyes.

Their mother gave a sharp cry. "You just let me catch you!"

"Yes Mother! No Mother!" chorused the girls. Their voices were meekly contrite. But their replies, although contradictory, meant the same thing. That they would take good care not to let their mother catch them.

"Don't worry, Fred!" Tom Bell caught the look of distress in his wife's face. "They'd be all right. But don't you dare try it! Do you hear me?" he added sternly, glaring at his daughters.

"No, Father! Yes Father!" was their hasty reply. And this time they certainly meant it.

All the same, Bess did try it later on. She had to, to save her life. And fortunately she proved her father right by coming in on the next breaker.

"Well, what d'ye think of it, Fred? Will it do?" asked Bell as they turned back the following morning.

"Aye, Tom, it'll do."

Neither remembered that with those very words they had dared the fates and made their ill-starred landing on the island a year before.

In happy mood, talking eagerly of the coming move, parents and children made their way back to Denham Bay. As usual the two older girls outran the others when they reached the foot of the cliffs and got to the hut first.

The door stood wide open.

"Father-mother! Come quickly!"

"What is it? What's the matter?" cried their father. He came running.

One glance told the story. The place had been ransacked. The children's beds were stripped. Clothing, bedding, tins and boxes were piled in confusion on the floors of the two bedrooms and the kitchen, where the boys slept in a partitioned corner.

On its inhospitable shores they had landed and burned their ship. There, amid scenes of drunkenness and debauchery, the final chapters in one of the grimmest sagas of the sea were written, and Fletcher Christian's son was born of his Tahitian mother. Within a few years, every man on the island save two had met with violent death. Only the women and young children were left, to carry on in later years an amazing story of regeneration and redemption. A generation later, a number of families were removed to Norfolk Island. Here Parkins Christian had married and made his home, until the sea called him.

He told the young Bells nothing of this dark chapter in his family history, but regaled them with snatches of the immortal story of the Great White Whale, Moby Dick, that bit whaleboats in half and crunched them to pieces in his awful jaws.

"Come again! Come again!" the children called as they waved their guests good-bye.

The California visited Sunday Island several times. On his second visit not long afterwards, Captain Brightman brought his wife with him. That was a wonderful day for Frederica Bell. Mrs. Brightman was the first woman she had seen and spoken to since she had left Samoa three years before.

Parkins Christian proved a good friend to Tom Bell. A handyman of rare ability, he was skilled in all the Polynesian arts that had enabled the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives to survive the ordeal of life on Pitcairn. During the years of the 'eighties, moving from the California to other ships, he still kept in touch with the family, helping Tom in numberless ways in the building of his one-man Utopia, until his ship made its final trip to Sunday Island, and they saw him no more.

The California brought the family not only urgently needed supplies for their bodily needs, but food for their minds as well, in the form of several bound volumes of the Illustrated London News, and a number of copies of a genteel and highly popular American women's magazine, the Lily. It was one of the first journals of its kind and contained a remarkable variety of articles and stories of feminine interest. Its founder and editor was Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, who later won world fame as pioneer of a campaign for taking women out of their skirts and putting them into trousers, later modified to the bloomer.

"Listen to this," said Mrs. Bell, looking over a Lily after the California had sailed on her way. "It says 'Long skirts, small waists and whalebones can be dispensed with, and we women shall be allowed breathing room and our forms shall be what Nature made them.' What nonsense!"

Neither mother nor daughters were impressed. They had no idea that those modest words were destined to echo through the world, and usher in a new age that started with the baggy bloomer and found its highest expression more than half a century later in skin-fitting matador pants. Their waists were as God made them; the only whalebone the girls had ever heard of was that which held ocean monsters' bodies together, and their skirts reached no lower than their knees.

Just what the tough whalers found to interest them in the refinements of the Lily, Mrs. Bell could not fathom, but she and the girls, to whom she read it aloud, enjoyed the social items and descriptions of a kind of life of ease and elegance they were never to know.

The younger children spent whole evenings poring over the "London Illustrateds," until the pages were dog-eared and worn, listening raptly to their parents' explanations of the pictures, and discussions of items of deep and nostalgic interest to the exiles.

Thus at last, the windows of the great outside world began to open to the little family leading a Crusoe existence on an island at the bottom of the world.

For reasons of her own, Frederica Bell gave thanks that evening for the timely arrival of the California. She looked with immense satisfaction at her own pile of goods from the whaler's well-stocked storeroom; a quantity of denim for the children's tunics, the boys' pants and the girls' short, full skirts. Their clothes were now almost in tatters after three years' heavy wear and tear—especially tear! There was also a bolt of brown holland, superior in quality to any she had been able to buy in New Zealand, which she would use for the girls' best dresses with rows of tucks on the bodice and a few flounces round the skirt. Most urgently needed of all, and now provided, was a bolt of white flannelette and another of fine white lawn.

She had brought with her from New Zealand a little hand sewing machine treasured all her married life, a Swiftsure. In the days that followed, the insistent click-clicking of the machine was heard hour after hour, as Mrs. Bell sat and sewed in her sunny room, overlooking an unbroken panorama of sea and sky, still thanking Providence for the coming of the ship, thinking of the new baby who would not now be long in coming.

More and more of the housework and care of the younger children were taken over by Hettie and Bess. Now that their lives were running on more normal lines, there was time for them to learn to cook and sew, and they helped their mother in every possible way, just as they had helped their father. Hunting and climbing, digging and hard manual toil would be their lot for years to come, but their horizons were gradually widening as the last days of their frustrated childhood slipped swiftly away.

Presently there came a day when the Swiftsure ceased its clicking. Mrs. Bell laid aside her sewing in neatly-folded piles and sighed a deep sigh of relief.

One morning a few days later, Tom Bell woke the girls earlier than usual.

"Your mother's not well," he told them briefly. "She's going to stay in bed. Bess, you get breakfast and then take the children over to Nightbell Gully for the day.

"Seems a bit mean, doesn't it?" said Bess with a twinge of compunction. "Think it hurts them?"

"No, of course not. They'll grow others just like a rooster does," was the reassuring reply as Hettie tugged out another feather.

She had not the slightest grounds for her assurance; she simply wanted the feathers, a pair of which made a showy and charming present for the chance visitor-and presents of any kind were hard to come by on Sunday Island.

The feathers were very highly prized by the Maoris. In days gone by they had formed part of the ceremonial head-dress of high-born tribal chiefs. Sometimes they found their way to the South Island in exchange for the flint-hard greenstone from which tribal treasures, ornaments, and other heirlooms were fashioned.

It was only the North Island tribes who ever acquired the coveted bird. Sometimes one or two would be blown down the six hundred miles of ocean from the Kermadecs to the north Auckland beaches. Dead, or completely exhausted, they would be picked up by Maoris who patrolled the cliffs and beaches after every heavy northerly storm.

The tropic birds were confirmed show-offs, and in the mating season their antics were comic as they danced in mid-air, bowed to their lady loves, flapping their rosy wings and trying to stand on their elegant tails. But their beauty was but feather-deep! They had the most distressingly raucous voices of all the Sunday Island birds, and their strident cry, uttered several times in harsh repetition, often brought the Bells to the cliffs to watch, as the birds danced and pranced, seeming to take an almost human pride in showing off their fine feathers to the more soberly clad birds of the island.

Another beautiful visitor was the silky white tern, with plumage of exquisite softness, pure white, relieved only by a tinge of blue on the beak and around the eyes. With wide, slender wing-spread, the birds hovered incessantly over their nesting places, usually a hole in the flat branch of a tree, with monotonous cries that sounded like "Trossit, trossit!" so that for the Bells they were always the "trossit birds."

One of the most fascinating glimpses of bird life Sunday Island ever gave the family was that of a white tern perched on a pohutukawa branch with five live sprats held firmly in her beak for her baby bird's breakfast. How she managed to catch them, and then push them one by one into the gaping bill of the hungry chick without dropping the others, the watchers could not fathom. But she managed it by some subtle bird trickery, and then flew off for a repeat order.

As volcanic activity in the crater slowly worked itself out, earthquakes shook the Sunday Island mountain sides and cliffs frequently. The Bells took them warily, but gradually became used to them, as people do when living in an earthquake area. One of the most severe took place soon after the family had moved over to North Beach. They spent an alarming day in dread of a fresh eruption in the crater as the earth shuddered and heaved beneath their feet and trees tossed in the air at fantastic angles. But beyond unusually high and low tides, and heavy clouds of steam issuing from the crater vents and Steamburge Rock, there was no spectacular aftermath as in the great eruption of 1872, when a mass of rock was suddenly heaved up from the bed of the ocean in Denham Bay. Large enough at first to give shelter to ships, it was named Wolverine Rock, after the warship Wolverine, which visited the island shortly afterwards. Exploring parties from whalers landed on the island later, and found it to consist of lava, scoria, and cinders. By the time the Bells reached the island, it was little more than a projecting rock over which the waves broke heavily at high tide.

It was inevitable that two such ardent garden lovers should become acquainted. Soon they were exchanging plants and seeds with mutual enthusiasm. Sir George's mind ran on practical as well as aesthetic lines. One of his first gifts to the Bells was a couple of pure bred Plymouth Rock hens and a rooster, also several turkeys. The young Bells named the fowls Sir George Grey, Lady Grey and Miss Grey. They bore their honours well, raised numerous progeny, and provided the Bells with table poultry and eggs in abundance. The turkeys proved less adaptable. Some of them "went bush" (escaped and went wild) and gradually died out.

Another gift from Sir George, prized equally by husband and wife, was a packet of seed from a special strain of Havana tobacco. It grew well, and provided them with a good substitute when other supplies gave out. When the plants were fully grown, the leaves were picked, rolled in strips and hung from the kitchen ceiling to dry. Mrs. Bell never became a heavy smoker, but often enjoyed a pipe with her husband in the evening, when the day's work was done.

Even more acceptable to her than the tobacco was a gift of tea plants, sent by Sir George together with a number of coffee plants, also two varieties of fine Smyrna figs. These last were planted in a sheltered corner of the Terraces and forgotten.

Greatly to Mrs. Bell's disappointment, the tea plants died, but the coffee plants flourished. Her husband brought from New Zealand a small coffee mill, and the Bells were soon grinding their own beans. The mother, however, still gazed wistfully at her teapot, frequently empty. When an occasional pound of tea came her way, she was delighted, but could never persuade her daughters to share her joy very willingly.

"I'd love a cup of tea," she would sometimes confide to one or other of the girls. The reply was always the same.

"All right, mother. Have one.""I don't like drinking by myself. If I make one, will you——?"

"Oh all right," the girls would laugh good-naturedly, "put the kettle on!"

One New Year's Day, Bess wandered across the Terraces, worried because it was her mother's birthday and she had no present to give her. Suddenly she thought of the figs, planted a couple of summers previously. "I wonder how they're getting on?" she said to herself. "I don't believe anybody's ever looked at them since Dad put them in. They ought to have grown quite big by now. I'll go and have a look."

To her delight, she found they had not only grown quite big, but that one was loaded with ripe figs bursting with sweetness. Once again, Sunday Island soil and climate had produced a near-miracle. When weighed later, some of the figs were found to be almost half a pound in weight.

Gathering a handful of nikau leaves, Bess sat down beneath the tree and plaited a neat fruit basket, which she lined with ferns. Then she filled it with the choicest of the figs and took it home, with a well-satisfied "Happy Birthday, Mother!" Frederica Bell was delighted. It was the only gift she received and made the day's double celebration one she long remembered.

Among other gifts from the Kawau orchards were cuttings of gold and purple grapes. "The old chap didn't tell me the names," remarked Bell as he planted them, "but he said they were something very special, and he knows what he's talking about." Evidently he did. The grapes, trained across a wire fence, grew with quite astonishing rapidity, and turned out to be superb varieties, one producing bunches of fruit a foot in length, packed tightly with purple-bloomed grapes the size of damson plums.

Mrs. Bell, not to be outdone, took possession of a bundle of strawberry runners, and following an idea of her own, planted them on a pyramid of rich soil with a calabash of water filtering through the top. Bessie's comment and nostalgic sigh many years later, testified to the success of the method. "I've never seen their equal for size and flavour. I don't think the Garden of Eden itself could have beaten them!"

Bell also brought from New Zealand flower seeds and plants of all varieties, including some of the best standard and climbing roses of the day. Several of the most beautiful of these he planted on the little cliff-top grave.

From Niue and other islands, the traders and kanakas brought pomegranates, mandevillea, and rare varieties of hibiscus. One of these bore a particularly beautiful flower, deep crimson lake in colour, to which the Bells gave the unromantic name of "Shoeblack." When crumpled in the hand and rubbed on leather, the petals produced a rich black polish. As every member of the family invariably went barefooted, however, the flower was prized more for its beauty than its utility, this being confined to an occasional shine-up of footwear brought from Samoa. Frederica Bell would pick up a small pair of shoes or boots with scratched heels and scuffed toes, long since outgrown, with the firm intention of throwing them away. After looking at them for a moment, she would hesitate, and with a mother's sigh, polish them up once more and replace them quickly in their box.

Another hibiscus that grew plentifully in the Sunday Island forests was a tree variety which bore handsome yellow flowers. This tree, reaching a height of fifteen feet, not only added to the beauty of the forest glades, but in true Swiss Family Robinson tradition, provided the Bells with an indispensable household necessity, a plentiful supply of coarse and fine string. It was very easily made. A cut was made near the base of the tree and the bark pulled upward in long strips. These were soaked in water for a few days, until the bark fell away, leaving a tough, lacy inner fibre. This was hung in the sun to dry, and then shredded into wide or narrow strips as required for light or heavy use in the making of fishing lines and nets, the sewing up of woolsacks, tying up of plants, for plaiting of tether ropes—for so many and varied purposes, indeed, that it is hard to imagine how the Bells would have fared without their handsome hibiscus.

Among the novel uses to which the twine was put was that of tying together the feet of mutton birds during the process of smoking. More spectacular was its use on a later occasion, which served as a herculean test of strength between Hettie and Bess, grown to a pair of sturdy young Amazons.

They had gone out mutton-birding on the crater cliffs, where the birds hatched out in thousands. Each carried a sack, which, when filled, would have ranked as a good day's catch, and also as a fairly heavy load.

"Let's see how many we can carry," suggested Hettie when the sacks were full. It was truly a day of massed slaughter for the boobies! By the dozen, by the score, the young birds were gathered in, strung together by the neck on hibiscus ropes, and festooned round the girls' shoulders and waists, round their bodies, round their necks, until they looked like walking pillars of dead birds.

"Can't go fast with this load!" declared Bess, pausing for breath at the top of a cliff. "Let's count them when we get home."

One hundred and thirty for Hettie, including those in the sack, one hundred and ten for Bess. Each bird averaging a pound and a half in weight, a load of nearly two hundred pounds for Hettie, one hundred and sixty-five for Bess.

"That beats hollow your seventy-six of sugar from Denham Bay!" exclaimed Hettie triumphantly. "I don't suppose either of us will ever do better."

"You can try if you want to. This'll do me!" By tacit consent the record was allowed to stand.

They retired to a strategic position outside and remained there peeping through a window, as the leader of the party, whose back was turned to them, stood up on his rickety stool and waved a chipped enamel mug.

"Now boys, let's drink a toast to good ole Tom!" he cried.

"Gen'lmen, charge yer glasses—I mean yer mugs—and drink 'is 'ealth! Good ole Tom, King o' . . . King o' the Kerma-hic-dicks! Now boys, give it lip, come on, "F'r 'e's a Jolly Good Feller!"

"An' now, gen'lmen, I'm going to crown 'im!" the boatbuilder went on, when the hubbub of shouting and singing subsided. "Havn' got a golden crown, Tom, but I'm goin' ter give you a reel good present, a pres-preshent fit for a king ... a case o' whisky. Yere y'are, Tom, a dozen o' the best ol' Scotch, and now we'll drink again ter th' King o' the Ker-ker!" Suddenly he caught sight of the girls' faces at the window.

"S'trousers!" he gasped, and losing his balance under the stress of the shock crashed to the floor.

Picking up their sacks as roars of laughter and general bedlam broke loose in the hut, the girls made a hurried move towards the lagoon.

Late that afternoon, after they had finished the washing, they watched the Vavau party push off to their ship, and then went back to the hut. Their father was still sitting at the table, with a newly-opened bottle of whisky in front of him. The remainder of his Coronation gift stood on the floor beside his stool. He was quite sober, but the celebration, coming on top of a long, arid spell of total abstinence, had left its mark. His face was flushed beyond the boundaries of its mantling whiskers; and his eyes seemed not to focus quite as well as usual.

"I'm going back home now," he told the girls, who were eyeing him silently. "Got to get back tonight. You can bring this stuff over with you tomorrow."

He stood up, held on to the table for a second or two, then corked the whisky bottle carefully and put it in his bag.

"All right, father," said Hettie casually. "Goodbye. Take care of yourself."

"What d'you mean? Don't I always take care of meself?" he demanded. It was not quite the remark for a girl to make to a father who had just been crowned a King. "You just take care of yourself, and don't you drop any of that stuff tomorrow, that's all."

He went off. The girls laughed, and set about putting the hut in order.

Next day, Mary came running across the Terraces to meet them, with a subdued excitement of manner which told them she had important news.

Panting from her haste, she gasped, "What d'you think? They're all tight!"

"All what? mum? tight!" They stopped in their tracks as though a thunderbolt had crashed at their feet.

"Well, you know, not exactly tight," conceded Mary hastily, "but all chatty and laughing more than she ever does as a rule. Father and Mr. Avent too. They've got a bottle of something on the table."

With meaning glances at each other, Bess and Hettie sat down on the grass, took the Coronation whisky bottles from their packs, and gouged out the corks with their hunting knives.

"We'll have no more of that," said Bess firmly.

One by one they pushed the bottles upside down into the ground and left them to drain.

Mary looked on in horror. "He'll kill you!"

"No fear he won't," said Bess tersely. "Not both of us at once, anyway," she added meaningly, replacing her knife in its sheath.

Tom Bell took one look as the girls threw their bundles of washing on the verandah and stood empty-handed.

"Where the . . .? What the . . .?" he roared, leaping to his feet.

Whatever the Bells' thoughts may have been, the ceremony was conducted in a very friendly spirit, and after an inspection of Bell's plantations, the visitors were reported to "have had refreshments with the family, smoked mutton birds, yams, with tea and goat's milk to drink." It was further recorded that "the girls and boys were very well spoken," and "that most of the work appeared to be done by the girls, whose costumes were primitive, consisting of cotton dresses, very loose and just confined to the waist with a belt. Of boots and stockings, nothing was seen."

Before the party left, Bell went closely into the matter of the annexation with Mr. Percy Smith, New Zealand's Surveyor-General. He explained that it was not so much the annexation which disturbed him as the manner in which it had been carried out. Had instructions been given to the captain of the Diamond to make a full inspection of the island, he would have been enabled to submit a proper report, stating that for ten years it had been in the sole possession of a British family who had cleared large tracts of land and made many improvements.

Having been made a tenant-at-will on Government land without advice or notification, Bell therefore claimed in the interests of his large family a portion of at least 900 acres of the island's 4,000 acres of farming land. He marked the required area on a chart, claiming later that Smith had given a definite undertaking that this would be secured to him.

After the annexation, life went on much the same as usual, but deep in Bell's heart there was now an inevitable feeling of insecurity and unresolved tension with regard to the future.

This apprehension very soon proved to be only too well founded.

Early in 1889, the New Zealand Government decided to throw Sunday Island open for settlement and divided it into three blocks, averaging about 1,000 acres apiece.

A few days later, disaster struck in the form of some strange combination of cyclone and waterspout.

"Light rain until sundown," runs the dramatic entry, "when a most unusual darkness fell, but nobody took any notice, as we were having tea. After a while I went outside to see what was up, and found the sky was black as ink. All at once there was a dull roaring noise, followed by several heavy gusts of wind. Then came a splutter of Hghtning with some peals of thunder, almost drowned by the roaring, which completely puzzled us all as we had never heard anything like it before.

"All at once the full fury burst over us. Down came the rain in a way we had never seen. It seemed to fall in long strips. All the gullies in the cliffs at the back of the Bay became tearing rivers; in fifteen minutes the whole place was six inches deep in water and presently it deepened to two feet. . . . The water rushed through the house like a river. The walls were burst in on one side and out the other; everything was swept before the flood and carried out into the bay. The noise of falling rocks and landslides and the roaring of the rain was so terrific that we could not hear each other speak. This went on for four hours. Then the water began to fall away and the rain lessened. When morning came, it had stopped, although the sky still looked black."

After the collapse of their house, the Bells made their way through the storm to the shelter of one of the scientists' huts which had withstood its fury. Here they camped until new huts were built. Denham Bay presented a scene of complete devastation the morning after the disaster. The swamp level had risen until most of the huts were three feet deep under water. The patakas and boat-shed had been washed out to sea, and the boat was buried in mud. Worst of all, the gardens were completely destroyed, being covered to a depth of five feet beneath rocks, logs, mud and debris brought down in landslides from the cliffs. All that was left in the way of food was a few bunches of bananas, and some yams and other food stored in one of the patakas. The storm had also wrought havoc with the bird life in Denham Bay. The diarist wrote on April 10:

"All through the night we had heard the birds crying out in great distress. The beach was now piled with their dead bodies," runs the following day's entry in the diary. "This is certainly the worst disaster by tenfold, of any that has ever occurred to us during the past thirty years." He concludes: "We have held a grand council, and the resolution is, 'off first trip!' "

But it was a full year before a ship called, a year during which the Bell saga drew sadly to an end just as it had begun, with increasing threat of starvation, renewal of the plague of rats, and weary day-by-day vigil as the family waited for a ship more than six months overdue.

On the brink of despair, Roy and his brother built a raft of long calabashes, braced together in a frame. In other calabashes, they placed bottles containing letters describing the disaster and the family's need of assistance. The raft, which had a sail, was marked in red lettering "h.m.s. firedrake" and set adrift. It sailed quickly out of sight. "I have not much faith in it," wrote Roy, "but still, it is all we can do."

On April 6, just a year after the cyclone, the long-awaited Government steamer Tutanekai at last dropped anchor in Denham Bay.

"The ship is leaving in half an hour," runs the last pathetic entry in the diary. "We had only managed to get half our stuff aboard when we had to stop. The rest must be left until next year, as we now have to go on board.

"Sunday Island has treated us very badly, and I am not sorry to be leaving.

"Goodbye, Sunday!

Roy Bell."