The other day, after the roads were made, it was observed the women plunged along margin through the bush, and when they came to a bridge waded through the water:  roads and bridges were the work of men’s hands, and tapu for the foot of women.  Even a man’s saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no self-respecting lady dares to use.  Thus on the Anaho side of the island, only two white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess saddles; and when a woman has a journey to make she must borrow from one or other.  It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of them, to an increased reserve between the sexes.  Regard for female chastity is the usual excuse for these disabilities that men delight to lay upon their wives and mothers.  Here the regard is absent; and behold the women still bound hand and foot with meaningless proprieties!  The women themselves, who are survivors of the old regimen, admit that in those days life was not worth living.  And yet even then there were exceptions.  There were female chiefs and (I am assured) priestesses besides; nice customs curtseyed to great dames, and in the most sacred enclosure of a High Place, Father Simeon Delmar was shown a stone, and told it was the throne of some well-descended lady.  How exactly parallel is this with European practice, when princesses were suffered to penetrate the strictest cloister, and women could rule over a land in which they were denied the control of their own children.

But the tapu is more often the instrument of wise and needful restrictions.  We have seen it as the organ of paternal government.  It serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing to enforce them, rights of private property.  Thus a man, weary of the coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapus his door; and to this day you may see the palm-branch signal, even as our great-grandfathers saw the peeled wand before a Highland inn.  Or take another case.  Anaho is known as ‘the country without popoi.’  The word popoi serves in different islands to indicate the main food of the people:  thus, in Hawaii, it implies a preparation of taro; in the Marquesas, of breadfruit.  And a Marquesan does not readily conceive life possible without his favourite diet.  A few years ago a drought killed the breadfruit trees and the bananas in the district of Anaho; and from this calamity, and the open-handed customs of the island, a singular state of things arose.  Well-watered Hatiheu had escaped the drought; every householder of Anaho accordingly crossed the pass, chose some one in Hatiheu, ’gave him his name’—­an onerous gift, but one not to be rejected—­and from this improvised relative proceeded to draw his supplies, for all the world as though he had paid for them.  Hence a continued traffic on the road.  Some stalwart fellow, in a loin-cloth, and glistening with sweat, may be seen at all hours of the day, a stick across his bare shoulders, tripping nervously under