"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby. "Bunster is there, and
we'll let them settle it between them. It will be a case, I imagine,
of Mauki getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance
in either event."

If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due
north, magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles he will
lift the pounded coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe
is a ring of land some one hundred and fifty miles in circumference,
several hundred yards wide at its widest, and towering in places to a
height of ten feet above sea level. Inside this ring of sand is a
mighty lagoon studded with coral patches. Lord Howe belongs to the
Solomons neither geographically nor ethnologically. It is an atoll,
while the Solomons are high islands; and its people and language are
Polynesian, while the inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.

Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which
continues to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its
beaches by the southeast trade. That there has been a slight
Melanesian drift in the period of the northwest monsoon, is also
evident.

Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or Ontong-Java as it is sometimes
called. Thomas Cook & Son do not sell tickets to it, and tourists do
not dream of its existence. Not even a white missionary has landed on
its shore. Its five thousand natives are as peaceable as they are
primitive. Yet they were not always peaceable. The Sailing Directions
speak of them as hostile and treacherous. But the men who compile the
Sailing Directions have never heard of the change that was worked in