race had, in the course of nature, been obliterated. A few frescoes
adorning remote rock shelters, a few pearl shell fish-hooks, stone axes
and, hammers, a rude mortar or two (merely granite rocks in which shallow
depressions had been worn by the pounding of nuts), shells on the sites
of camps, scars of stone axes on a few trees--these were the only relics
of the departed race.

Has a decade of occupation by wilful white folks wrought any permanent
change in the stamp of Nature? None, save the exotic plants, that time,
fire, and "white ants" might not consume. My kitchen midden is less
conspicuous than those of the blacks, and, decently interred, glass and
china shards the only lasting evidence thereof, for the few fragments of
iron speedily corrode to nothingness in this damp and saline air.
Unwittingly the blacks handed down specimens of their handicraft--the
pearl shell fish-hooks, a thousand times more durable in this climate
than hooks of steel. Geologists tell us that shells with iridescent
colours are found in clays of such ancient date that if stated in
centuries an indefinite number of millions would have to be assigned to
them. It is not strange, then, that some of my pearl shell hooks are as
lustrous and sharp to-day as when the careless maker mislaid them in the
sand for me to find half a century later. We leave no records on the land
itself which would betray us after the lapse of half a dozen years. Is it
not humiliating to find that the white man as the black records his most
durable domestic history in rubbish, easily expungible by clean-fingered
time?

Is humanity ever free from worries? What it has not it invents. Remote
though we are from the disturbance of other folk's troublous cries, the
ocean does not afford complete exemption from the sight of the shocking
insecurity of the street.