AN UNEXPECTED CLAIM.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 24, 11 June 1892, Page 598

AN UNEXPECTED CLAIM.

Queer things are continually happening in out of-the-way places of which the world at large knows nothing. A planter in Samoa, who was fond of plenty of elbow room, decided to emigiate. He bad heard that, years before, two Englishmen married Samoan girls and took them to live over fifteen hundred miles away on Sunday Island, one of the smallest specks in the Pacific. It is a lovely spot, fertile, temperate, and healthful, and the two little families dwelt there for ten years, until they began to pine for society. Then Sunday Island lost its human lesidents. The planter decided that this must be the paiadise he was seeking, and in 1878 a trading vessel landed the Bell family and all their wordly belongings on the little island. There they have lived ever since, raising European vegetables and other crops. Every year or two a vessel has dropped into Denham Bay to see Bell, sell him some clothing and hardware, and take away his marketable products. Bell called the island his farm. No human beings lived nearer the Bell family than New Zealand. It must have been a great surprise to Bell when finally a British gunboat honouied him with a visit. The Assistant Surveyor-General of New Zealand went briskly ashore, and with a force of chainmen set about surveying the premises. A few days later he informed that lover of solitude that bis farm contained seven thousand two hundred acres, and, moreover, that he might work it on shares with Queen Victoria, as that part of the world had

suddenly been annexed to the British Empire. The annexation also include I the other islands of the Kermadec group, four in number, the largest of which is only one-tenth the size of Bell’s farm. Then the gunboat sailed away, leaving the new fledged British subject behind to meditate upon the remarkable change that had just occurred in the political status of his farm.