“No,” returned the Frenchman, quickly; “music would make them liberals.”

A little farther on, in the valley of Punaruu, the amiable violinist and pianist showed me the ruins of defense works thrown up by the French to withstand the attacks of the great chieftain, Oropaa of Punaauia, who with his warriors had here disputed foot by foot the advance of the invaders.  These Tahitians were without artillery, mostly without guns of any sort, but they utilized the old strategy of the intertribal wars, and rolled huge rocks down upon the French troops in narrow defiles.

We saw from our seats through the shadows of the gorge of Punaruu two of the horns of Maiao, the Diadem.  In the far recesses of those mountains were almost inaccessible caves in which the natives laid their dead, and where one found still their moldering skeletons.  M. Brault touched my shoulder.

“Rumor has it that the body of Pomare the Fifth is there,” he said; “that it was taken secretly from the tomb you have seen near Papeete, and carried here at night.  There are photographs of those old skeletons taken in that grotto of the tupapaus, as the natives call the dead and their ghosts.  The natives will not discuss that place.”

It was from Punaauia that Teriieroo a Teriierooterai had gone to Papenoo to be chief.  This was the seat of his ancienne famille.  Here he had been a deacon of the church, as he was in Papenoo, because it meant social rank, and was possible insurance against an unknown future.  The church edifice was the gathering-place, as once had been the marae, the native temple.  This was Sunday, and I passed a church every few miles, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant vying.  They had matched each other in number since the French admiral had exiled the British missionary-consul, and compelled the queen to erect a papal church for every bethel.

Along the road and in the churchyards the preachers and deacons were in black cloth, sweating as they walked, their faces beatudinized as in America.

Many carried large Bibles, and frowned on the merry, singing crew who went by on foot, in carriages and automobiles.  Everywhere, in all countries, the long, black coat and white or black cravat are the uniforms of evangelism.  In Tahiti I saw ministers of the gospel, white and brown, appareled like circuit-riders in Missouri; hot, dusty, and their collars wilted, but their souls serene and sure in their mission.  They associated God and black, as night and darkness.

The sound of sermons echoed from chapels as we progressed, the voices raised in the same tone one heard in a Methodist camp-meeting in Kansas, and the singing, when in French, having much the same effect, a whining, droning fashion; without spirituality or art.