Page:Vailima Letters - Stevenson, Colvin - 1894.djvu/34

home. Here, fondly supposing my long day was over, I rubbed down; exquisite agony; water spreads the poison of these weeds; I got it all over my hands, on my chest, in my eyes, and presently, while eating an orange, à la Raratonga, burned my lip and eye with orange juice. Now, all day, our three small pigs had been adrift, to the mortal peril of our corn, lettuce, onions, etc., and as I stood smarting on the back verandah, behold the three piglings issuing from the wood just opposite. Instantly I got together as many boys as I could — three, and got the pigs penned against the rampart of the sty, till the others joined; where- upon we formed a cordon, closed, captured the deserters, and dropped them, squeaking amain, into their strengthened barracks where, please God, they may now stay!

Perhaps you may suppose the day now over; you are not the head of a plantation, my juvenile friend. Politics succeeded: Henry got adrift in his English, Bene was too cowardly to tell me what he was after: result, I have lost seven good labourers, and had to sit down and write to you to keep my temper. Let me sketch my lads. — Henry — Henry has gone down to town or I could not be writing to you — this were the hour of his English lesson else, when he learns what he calls 'long explessions' or 'your chief's language' for the matter of an hour and a half — Henry is a chiefling from Savaii; I once loathed, I now like and — pending fresh discoveries — have a kind of