Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/178

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154
THE BOY TRAVELLERS IN AUSTRALASIA

several churches, which represented the Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist faiths, a great number of shops and stores, and many well-built warehouses, cottages, and other dwellings. They went to the principal hotel before proceeding to call upon their consuls or
A NEW ARRIVAL.
make any acquaintances, and the proprietor immediately offered to show them the sights of Suva.

He pointed out the Governor's residence, the jail, hospital, custom-house, and lunatic asylum, together with other public edifices. Doctor Bronson suggested that there was every indication of a fixed community when so young a place could boast of a jail and a lunatic asylum, not to speak of the custom-house and the hospital.

"We needed a jail here before anything else," was the reply to his remark. "All the riffraff of the South Seas seemed to be collected in Feejee before the annexation, and there was nothing but the powerful arm of law, with jails and other paraphernalia, that could preserve order."

"They had been gathering here for a long time, I presume," said the Doctor, "and were most numerous just before the annexation."

"There had been a fair sprinkling of beach-combers and idlers," was the reply, "ever since the islands were first occupied by white men. After them came men who wished to engage in planting cotton, sugar, and other things for which the islands were supposed to be favorable; there were some adventurers among them; but, on the whole, they were a good class of citizens, as they were nearly all of birth and education, and most of them brought some capital with which to go into business.

"But in the latter part of the sixties we were inundated with a different lot of adventurers. A few came with the design of planting cotton, or engaging in some other honest employment, but the great majority were penniless fellows, with no fondness for decent occupations. Many of them had left the Australian colonies to avoid arrest for swindling or other crimes, and there was a fair share of men for