290 SHADOWS OF COMING EVENTS. 
advice and counsel. The bias of his judgment 
had, from the first, been in favour of a transfer 
to a more roomy spot. Baron de Thierry,* 
and others personally acquainted with Pitcairn, 
had represented to him, in vivid colours, the 
calamities which appeared too surely to impend 
over the island, with an increasing popula- 
tion, a diminishing quantity of food, and a 
precarious supply of indifferent water, which 
another landslip might cut off altogether. 
What a helpless position, humanly speaking, 
with nothing to attract shipping out of its usual 
course, no trade, no harbour, no means of repair, 
nothing but exposure and danger! Still the 
plan of a removal from home, a place to which 
the people were so fondly attached, the pastor 
knew to be one fraught with peril and trouble. 
He deemed, indeed, that the evil would, if let 
alone, become, like any other disease, mis- 
chievous by delay and neglect ; but, as a wise 
and skilful adviser, he declined pressing upon 
any one an operation which could not be con- 
templated without pain. 
Signs and shadows of coming events had 
then appeared. The notes of the singing- 
birds were no longer heard. " The birds," 
said he "have forsaken us. 77 All the families 
were then, in fact, about to take their leave 
of a spot full of deep interest to them, for a 
new, strange, and distant place of residence. 
Of Norfolk Island, and its present inhabitants, 
the author will have more to say presently, but he 
* In a letter dated Honolulu, Sandwich Islands, June 15, 1852. 
