“‘How many people were there in your day?’ I asked him.  He replied that there were many thousands.

“‘I lived there three years,’ he said.  ’I had a sweetheart named Manu, and I married her in the Marquesan way.  I was a runaway sailor, and one night on the beach I was captured and taken away on a ship.  I have been captain of a great American liner for years, always meaning to come back, and putting it off from year to year.  All my people are dead, and I thought I would come now and perhaps find her here and end my days.  I have plenty of money.’

“He seemed childish to me—­perhaps he really had lost mental poise by age.  I hadn’t the courage to tell him the truth.  We came on it soon enough.  You must see Typee to realize what people mean to a place.

“The nonos were simply hell, but as I had lived a good many years in Tai-o-hae I was hardened to them.  The old man slapped at them occasionally, but made no complaint.  He hardly seemed to feel them, or to realize what their numbers meant.  It was when we pushed up the trail through the valley, and he saw only deserted paepaes, that he began to look frightened.

“‘Are they all gone?’ he inquired weakly.

“‘No,’ I said, ‘there are fifteen or twenty here.’  We came to a clearing and there found the remnant of the Typees.  I questioned them, but none had ever heard of him.  There had been many Manus,—­the word means bird,—­but as they were the last of the tribe, she must have been dead before they were born, and they no longer kept in their memories the names of the dead, since there were so many, and all would be dead soon.

“The American still understood enough Marquesan to understand their answers, and taking me by the arm he left the horses and led me up the valley till he came to a spot where there were fragments of an old paepae, buried in vines and torn apart by their roots.

“‘We lived here,’ he said, and then he sat on the forsaken stones and cried.  He said that they had had two children, and he had been sure that at least he would find them alive.  His misery made me feel bad, and the damned nonos, too, and I cried—­I don’t know how damn sentimental it was, but that was the way it affected me.  The old chap seemed so alone in the world.

“‘It is three miles from here to the beach,’ he said, ’and I have seen men coming with their presents for the chief, walking a yard apart, and yet the line stretched all the way to the beach.’

“He could hardly ride back to Tai-o-hae, and he departed with the Tropic Bird without saying another word to any one.”

Typee, they told me, was half way to Atiheu and a good four miles by horse.  The road had been good when the people were many, and was still the main road of the island, leading through the Valley of Hapaa.  My steed was borrowed of T’yonny Howard, who, though he owned a valley, poured cement for day’s wages.