There was a joyous welcome, and a feast was brought, consisting of five pigs for Mr.Williams, five for his wife, and five for their baby-boy; besides crates of yams, bananas, and cocoa-nuts, which, however, they were not required to eat themselves, only to see eaten in their house.
The islanders were ready to give up their idols and call themselves Christians, to hear Mr.Williams preach, and to observe the Sabbath; being, in fact, like the Red Indians of Eliot's experience, so idle that a day of no work made no difference to them.

Their indolence, the effect of their enervating climate, was well-nigh invincible; they preferred hunger to trouble, and withal their customs were abhorrent to Christian morality.

Most islets of the South Seas have much the same experience.
The people, taken on their best side, show themselves gentle and intelligent, and their chiefs are dignified gentlemen; but there is a horrible background of ferocity and barbarism--often cannibalism.

It generally proves comparatively easy to obtain a recognition of Christianity, and the cruelty and violence are usually laid aside; but to bring purity and morality to bear upon these races is a much more difficult thing, and the apparent failures have been at once the grief and reproach of missionaries, while those who assail them with scoffs forget the difficulty of dealing with the inveterate customs of a whole people, in a luxurious climate, and with little or no inducement to such industrial occupations or refinements of mind, as are the best auxiliaries of religion in raising the tone.
Lands where cold is unknown, and where fruit grows as freely as in Paradise, offer no inducement to labour; and the missionaries, striving in vain to lead the people to think occupation a duty, were deserted as being troublesome when they bade them to work.

A school which the Williams's set up was more popular; the Polynesians had no lack of brains, and reading and writing were pleasanter than digging and building, or carrying logs.
Thinking that examples of the civilization that the islanders had never seen would do more for their advance than anything else, Mr.Williams, with such assistance as he could obtain from the natives, built himself a house with eight rooms, sash windows with Venetian blinds, a verandah, and a most beautiful garden, and filled it with polished furniture, made by his own clever mechanical hands.