‘Ici pas de Kanaques,’ said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her hands.  ’Tenez—­a little baby like this; then dead.  All the Kanaques die.  Then no more.’  The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.  Meanwhile the husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship’s offering, which I had just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary works and no more readers.

CHAPTER IV—­DEATH

The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the Marquesan.  It would be strange if it were otherwise.  The race is perhaps the handsomest extant.  Six feet is about the middle height of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and duller, are still comely animals.  To judge by the eye, there is no race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands.  When Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual natives.  Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar.  There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans:  Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected:  ‘He shall be able to see,’ ’He shall be able to tell,’ ‘He shall be able to charm,’ said the friendly godmothers; ‘But he shall not be able to hear,’ exclaimed the last.  The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred, when the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth.  Six months later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread like a fire about the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created solitude.  A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the tragic residue of Britain.  When I first heard this story the date staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible.  Early in the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and by the month of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, and that was a boy who had been absent at his schooling.  And depopulation works both ways, the doors of death being set wide open, and the door of birth almost closed.  Thus, in the half-year ending July 1888 there were twelve