Without a day's loss of
time the people began a new church. All were volunteers, some to
remove from the wreck of the old building such timbers as might
still be of service; some to quarry stone for a foundation, an
extravagance never before dreamed of by an islander; some to bring
sand in gourd-shells upon their heads, or laboriously gathered in
the folds of bark-cloth aprons; some to bring lime from the coral
reefs twenty feet under water; whilst the majority hurried to the
forest belt, miles away on the mountain side, to fell the
straightest and tallest trees. Then 50 or 100 men, (for in that day
horses and oxen were known only as wild beasts of the wilderness,)
attached hawsers to the butt ends of logs, and dragged them away
through bush and brake, through broken ground and river beds, till
they deposited them on the site of the new church. The wild,
monotonous chant, as the men hauled in the timber, lives in the
memories of the missionaries' children, who say that it seemed to
them as if the preparations for Solomon's temple could not have
exceeded the accumulations of the islanders!
I think that the greater number of the converts of those four years
must have died ere this.
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