Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped in white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind—­not many, for not many remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these were poor; the men in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or the gorgeous parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women, with a few exceptions, brightly habited.  Far in the rear came the widow, painfully carrying the dead man’s mat; a creature aged beyond humanity, to the likeness of some missing link.

The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone with the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and a layman took his office.  Standing at the head of the open grave, in a white coat and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and one eye bound with a red handkerchief, he read solemnly that chapter in Job which has been read and heard over the bones of so many of our fathers, and with a good voice offered up two prayers.  The wind and the surf bore a burthen.  By the cemetery gate a mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue.  In the midst the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the coffin-stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned her back to the grave and was playing with a leaf.  Did she understand?  God knows.  The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered and threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral.  Dust to dust:  but the grains of this dust were gross like cherries, and the true dust that was to follow sat near by, still cohering (as by a miracle) in the tragic semblance of a female ape.

So far, Mormon or not, it was a Christian funeral.  The well-known passage had been read from Job, the prayers had been rehearsed, the grave was filled, the mourners straggled homeward.  With a little coarser grain of covering earth, a little nearer outcry of the sea, a stronger glare of sunlight on the rude enclosure, and some incongruous colours of attire, the well-remembered form had been observed.

By rights it should have been otherwise.  The mat should have been buried with its owner; but, the family being poor, it was thriftily reserved for a fresh service.  The widow should have flung herself upon the grave and raised the voice of official grief, the neighbours have chimed in, and the narrow isle rung for a space with lamentation.  But the widow was old; perhaps she had forgotten, perhaps never understood, and she played like a child with leaves and coffin-stretchers.  In all ways my guest was buried with maimed rites.  Strange to think that his last conscious pleasure was the Casco and my feast; strange to think that he had limped there, an old child, looking for some new good.  And the good thing, rest, had been allotted him.