remittance in cash, for our notes were at a discount humiliating to
contemplate. Political strife ran high. I dropped into the House of
Assembly one afternoon toward the end of May, and, looking down from
the gallery, saw the colonel in the full tide of wrathful declamation.
He was demanding of miserable Don Antonio when the army was to be
paid. The latter sat cowering under his scorn, and would, I verily
believe, have bolted out of the House had he not been nailed to his
seat by the cold eye of the President, who was looking on from his
box. The minister on rising had nothing to urge but vague promises of
speedy payment; but he utterly lacked the confident effrontery of his
chief, and nobody was deceived by his weak protestations. I left the
House in a considerable uproar, and strolled on to the house of a
friend of mine, one Mme. Devarges, the widow of a French gentleman
who had found his way to Whittingham from New Calendonia. Politeness
demanded the assumption that he had found his way to New Caledonia
owing to political troubles, but the usual cloud hung over the precise
date and circumstances of his patriotic sacrifice. Madame sometimes
considered it necessary to bore herself and others with denunciations
of the various tyrants or would-be tyrants of France; but, apart from
this pious offering on the shrine of her husband's reputation, she
was a bright and pleasant little woman. I found assembled round her
tea-table a merry party, including Donna Antonia, unmindful of her
father's agonies, and one Johnny Carr, who deserves mention as being
the only honest man in Aureataland. I speak, of course, of the place
as I found it. He was a young Englishman, what they call a "cadet," of
a good family, shipped off with a couple of thousand pounds to make
his fortune. Land was cheap among us, and Johnny had bought an estate
and settled down as a landowner. Recently he had blossomed forth as a
keen Constitutionalist and a devoted admirer of the President's, and
held a seat in the assembly in that interest. Johnny was not a clever