strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have become outposts of the kingdom of the grave.  It might appear a natural and pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the rearguard of perished thousands, that their feet should leave untrod these hearthstones of their fathers.  I believe, in fact, the custom rests on different and more grim conceptions.  But the house, the grave, and even the body of the dead, have been always particularly honoured by Marquesans.  Until recently the corpse was sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and sunned, until, by gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of mummy.  Offerings are still laid upon the grave.  In Traitor’s Bay, Mr. Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son’s.  And the sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly ruffled in the laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient in the native hatred for the French.

The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race.  The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the reality with relief.  He does not even seek to support a disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave.  Hanging is now the fashion.  I heard of three who had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though this be a common form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will continue popular in the Marquesas.  Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which offers to the native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time for those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such remarkable importance.  The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house; and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like Caesar’s) adjusted for the final act.  Praise not any man till he is dead, said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners, might be the Marquesan parody.  The coffin, though of late introduction, strangely engages their attention.  It is to the mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy.  For ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the other day, they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the woman’s soul is at rest.  I was told a droll instance of the force of this preoccupation.  The Polynesians are subject to a disease seemingly rather of the will than of the body.  I was told the Tahitians have a word for it, erimatua, but cannot find it in my dictionary.  A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to succumb to this insubstantial malady,