has routed them from their houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two days has seen them cured.  But this other remedy is more original:  a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement—­perhaps I should rather say this acquiescence—­has been known, at the fulfilment of his crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his coffin—­to revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be restored for years to his occupations—­carving tikis (idols), let us say, or braiding old men’s beards.  From all this it may be conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches naturally.  I heard one example, grim and picturesque.  In the time of the small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had no thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.

This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to the Marquesan.  What is peculiar is the widespread depression and acceptance of the national end.  Pleasures are neglected, the dance languishes, the songs are forgotten.  It is true that some, and perhaps too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if there were spirit to support or to revive them.  At the last feast of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the inanimate performance of the dancers.  When the people sang for us in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.  They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the old that knew the songs.  The whole body of Marquesan poetry and music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited generation.  The full import is apparent only to one acquainted with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song following another without pause.  In like manner, the Marquesan, never industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production.  The exports of the group decline out of all proportion even with the death-rate of the islanders.  ’The coral waxes, the palm grows, and man departs,’ says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands.  And surely this is nature.  Fond as it may appear, we labour and refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid eye upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue.  It is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse the Marquesan from his lethargy.  Over all the landward shore of Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the trader’s store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was near full.  So long as the circus was there, so long as the Casco was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his visit; and to this end every woman must have a new dress, and every man a shirt and trousers.  Never before, in Mr. Regler’s experience, had they displayed so much activity.