The Protestant temple held a hundred and fifty people.  It was a plain hall, with doors opposite each other in the middle, and at one end a slightly raised platform on which sat the pastor and half a dozen deacons.  The pastor was delivering his sermon as I entered, he and all his entourage in black Prince-Albert coats.  He had a white shirt and collar and tie, but others masked a pareu under the wool, and were barelegged.  All wore solemn faces of a jury bringing in a death-verdict.  Paiere nodded to a volunteer janitor, who insisted upon my occupying a chair he brought.

Every one else was on the floor on mats, in two squares or separate divisions.  Babies lay at their mothers’ extended feet, and others ran about the room in silence.  The pastor’s sermon was about Ioba and his tefa pua, which he scraped with poa, the shells of the beach.  He pictured the man of patience as if in Tautira, with his three faithless friends, Elifazi, Bilidadi, and Tofari, urging him to deny God and to sin; and the speaker struck the railing with his fist when he enumerated the possessions taken from Ioba by God, but returned a hundredfold.  After he had finished, wiping the sweat from his brow with a colored kerchief, the himene began.

The only advance we have made since the Greeks is, in music.  Possibly in painting we have better mediums; but in philosophy, poetry, sculpture, decency, beauty, we have not risen.  We cure diseases more skilfully, but we have more; in health we are crippled by our cities and our customs.  Our violins and pianos, our orchestras, and symphonies, are our great achievements; but in these South Seas, where they do not count, the people had evolved a mass utterance of canticles more thrilling and, more enjoyable than the oratorios of Europe.  In these himenes one may see transfigured for moments the soul of the Polynesian ascending above the dust of the west, which smothers his articulation.

A woman in the center of a row suddenly struck a high note, beginning a few words from a hymn, or an improvisation.  She sang through a phrase, and then others joined in, singly or in pairs or in tens, without any apparent rule except close harmony.  These voices burst in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some high, some low, some singing words, and others merely humming resonantly, a deep, booming bass.  The surf beating on the reef, the wind in the cocoanut-trees, entered into the volume of sound, and were mingled in the emmeleia, a resulting magnificence of accord that reminded me curiously of a great pipe-organ.

The himene was the offspring of the original efforts of the Polynesians to adapt the songs of the sailormen, the national airs of the adventurers of many countries, the rollicking obscenities and drinking doggerel of the navies, and the religious hymns drilled into their ears by the missionaries, English and French.  Now the words and the meanings were inextricably confused.  A leader might begin with, “I am washed in the