A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from
Anaho to Hatiheu on the adjacent bay. The road is good travelling,
but cruelly steep. We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted
house which stands highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily
down upon its roof; the Casco well out in the bay, and rolling for
a wager, shrank visibly; and presently through the gap of Tari's
isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang cloudlike on the horizon. Over
the summit, where the wind blew really chill, and whistled in the
reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of the pandanus, we
stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale and bay of
Hatiheu. A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides. On the
fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to
seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one
practicable breach of the blue bay. The interior of this vessel is
crowded with lovely and valuable trees,--orange, breadfruit, mummy-
apple, cocoa, the island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine and the
banana. Four perennial streams water and keep it green; and along
the dell, first of one, then of another, of these, the road, for a
considerable distance, descends into this fortunate valley. The
song of the waters and the familiar disarray of boulders gave us a
strong sense of home, which the exotic foliage, the daft-like
growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of the banyan, the
black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of the
native houses dissipated ere it could be enjoyed.

The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more
melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is
deserted, the superstructure--pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable
tropical timber--speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the