plans for Melville's escape, but not able to see them carried out. The French ship sailed, and Melville, when the messenger told him, thought he would never see "Toby" again; indeed, it was the publication of Typee, in 1846, that brought him news of his old comrade and enabled him to complete his story with a sequel giving "Toby's" adventures. It was a great joy to our author, for Richard Tobias Greene was one of the earliest of his few friends. On the "Acushnet" the two had solaced their uncomfortable hours "with chat, song and story, mingled with a good many imprecations upon the hard destiny it seemed our common fortune to encounter. Toby, like myself, had evidently moved in a different sphere of life, and his conversation at times betrayed this, though he was anxious to conceal it. He was one of that class of rovers you sometimes meet at sea, who never reveal their origin, never allude to home, and go rambling over the world as if pursued by some mysterious fate they cannot possibly elude". In the main the crew were dastardly and mean-spirited wretches, and among them "Toby" shone like a bright flame out of foul smoke. After the publication of Typee. and the discovery that Greene was still alive, Melville received from him a lock of his hair-a portrait of 1846 shows how abundant it was and how "romantic" was Greene's appearance then. Later he became a journalist and editor, and in the Civil War was a clerk at Grant's Headquarters. Whether the early attachment faded with time I do not know, but Mr. Weaver is able to quote a letter from Greene, ten years after Typee was published, saying how proud he felt because of the immortality bestowed on him

in that book. He sought to return it by naming his son Herman Melville Greene, and other letters followed.

It was assuredly a bold thing of the friends to desert the "Acushnet" for an island which, as Melville knew, was a home of cannibals. The very name Typee, he says, in the Marquesan dialect signifies a lover of human flesh; and he himself was to discover that the open vices acquired from Europeans had not driven out the secret vice of cannibalism. He had heard of an English crew which, ignorant of the people, had been lured into the bay and murdered; yet the immediate oppression of the whaler seemed more intolerable than the danger of being devoured. He even excuses the bloody islanders, because of the crimes practised against them by foreigners; it is thus, he declares, that those called savages are taught to deserve the name. "When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the 'big canoe' of the European rolling through the blue waters toward their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate. The enormities perpetrated in the South Seas upon some of the inoffensive islanders well-nigh pass belief." It is consoling to reflect that Melville's indictment was written so long ago as 1846.

His own treatment by the Typees, as he recites it, was not at all unreasonably harsh-an indulgent captivity is his phrase-nor is his judgement of them

anywhere severe; and when his apprehensions were quenched by his escape, and he tasted again the miseries of a whaler, he had reason to wonder which evil was the greater. It was an Australian whaler named, or disguised by Melville as, the "Julia", and it was because she needed men rather than because a sailor was in distress that the captain was willing to delay until Melville was aboard. A small, slatternly-looking craft, very old, everything denoting an ill state of affairs, a wild, haggard crew-few prospects could be less inviting than a sojourn of unknown length in such a ship; but in the delirium of escape he was not too critical and signed on for one cruise with the understanding that he could, if he wished, claim his discharge at the next port. The captain was a landsman, the chief mate a toper, and the doctor, Long Ghost, had been banished to the forecastle for striking the captain. Half the men were sick and the food was abominable, and the captain only kept the ship at sea because if he landed he would probably lose all the crew. The crews manning such vessels as the "Julia" were, says Melville, mostly villains, port-sweepings, to be governed by scourges and chains; when two of the "Julia's" men died of their vices, they were tossed into the sea without ceremony, partly because there was neither Bible nor prayer-book to use for ceremony. The ship reached Tahiti-a fairy world it seemed to Melville as his eyes yearned towards this New Cytherea, as the French called it; but his eyes could do no more than yearn remotely, for the captain alone was to go on shore and leave the turbulent crew at sea until his return. And since, for a time at least, the chief mate was to be with the captain on shore, the ship was

committed to the charge of a dark moody savage, Bembo, a harpooner-man or devil as you will, adds our narrator.

At this the men were transported with anger, and resolved to send a round-robin to the English Consul by Baltimore, the cook, notifying their grievances and claiming redress. So ill-furnished was the ship that no paper nor ink could be found, and it was necessary to tear two blank leaves from an old volume pleasantly entitled A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies, before Melville was able to act as scribe for the crew and indict the story of their afflictions. For answer the Consul's deputy came on board, harangued them, and declared that they should put to sea again under the mate's command and return for their captain three months later. Disorder provoked mutiny, the "Julia" was anchored in the bay after an attempt at wrecking by Bembo, and the Consul's deputy arrested the mutineers, including Melville, and despatched them handcuffed to a French ship, the "Reine Blanche", for Valparaiso; subsequently, however, they were returned to shore and cast into jail. Repeated attempts were made to get them to resume duty on the "Julia", but they steadily refused, and after three weeks she sailed with a fresh crew, leaving Melville and the rest in mild confinement.

After more weeks, which our author employed in noting with unsympathetic acuteness the influence of civilization and missions upon native weakness, Melville and the doctor, Long Ghost, succeeded in getting removed to another island, Imeeo, to work on the plantations in the valley of Martair. Soon the irksome tasks and languid climate made them long for

idleness again, and they left for Tamai, a lonely inland settlement; but in the midst of their dreams of staying there indefinitely they were driven forth once more by the rumour of missionary interference. Melville's wanderings with Long Ghost make a pleasant story— so pleasant that the two seem to be tramping in modern fashion through a tourist-haunted island, until news of a ship in the harbour of Taloo took them eagerly thither. It was the "Leviathan" a whaler, and their appearance, and anxiety to ship, caused a good deal of curiosity. "Be off," cried one of the crew; "they murther us here every day, and starve us into the bargain." This unfriendly witness discouraged the exiles, but they were weary of isolation; not even the pleasure of visiting Po-Po, a native deacon of the church, as Melville calls him, and one of the only two true Christians he had ever met among all the natives of Polynesia, nor even the pleasure of finding three of Smollett's novels in Po-Po's possession-a rare, impossible joycould assuage that weariness. The "Leviathan" was abused by her crew, who wanted to terrify new hands with stories of hardships, so that the ship might lie the longer in that pleasant harbour. Other accounts, however, were far more agreeable: a cosier old craft never floated, the captain was the finest man in the world, food was abundant, and there was little to do. True she was a luckless ship, for whales escaped her though harpooned; but what of that? Above all, the "Leviathan" was on her last cruise, and in little more than a year would be sailing round Cape Horn.

The captain was a native of Nantucket, and his suspicions of Melville were banished when he discovered that the exile was an American; but Long