be shot, but it is inauspicious to shoot them in the village itself, because then they would go away and dire misfortune would happen. For every great family in Tonga has its death portent; with the Fatafehi it is the splitting of a great banyan tree; with the Tui Kanakubolu it is the roar of breakers on the reef in calm weather; with the Ata it is the sudden migration of the flying-foxes from the trees in Kolovai.
We had a delightful ride along the grassy road shaded with orange trees ripening to harvest. On either side of the road lay wide tracts of uncultivated bush, and I was sorry to see, mingled with the matted foliage, the ill-omened pink flowers of the Talatala hina. In the Parliament of 1891, when I sat on the Treasury bench, a panic bill had been hurried through, making it penal for any landowner to have this plant on his land after March, 1902. If the fines then provided were to be enforced now, the government would require no other source of revenue, for the plant, then confined to a small district at the back of the island, has now advanced to within a few miles of Nukualofa. It is a tough, creeping vine, armed with sharp, reflexed thorns, deep-rooted and very difficult to eradicate. Throwing its wicked arms about a young tree it thrusts
