This was the daily life of Lêla. At the very break of dawn, when thetrees and grass were heavy with the dews of the night, and the flocks ofmountain parrots screamed shrilly at the rising sun and the wild boar scurriedaway to his forest lair, the people were up and at work among their plantationsor out upon the blue expanse of Lêla Harbour in their canoes. For thoughthere was no need for them to do but the merest semblance of toil, yet it wasand always had been the custom of the land for each family to brin

It is open to any one to say that these tales are barbarous, and what Mrs Meynell, in a very clever and amusing essay, has called decivilised. Certainly there is a wide gulf separating life on a Pacific island from the accumulated culture of centuries of civilisation in the midst of which such as Mrs Meynell move and have their being. And if there can be nothing good in literature that does not spring from that culture, these stories must stand condemned. But such a view is surely too narrow. Much as I admi