Stanislao (Stanislaos, with the final consonant evaded after the Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America, and there educated by the fathers.  His French is fluent, his talk sensible and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he is of excellent service to the French.  With the prestige of his name and family, and with the stick when needful, he keeps the natives working and the roads passable.  Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt what would become of the present regimen in Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might not be suffered to close up, the pier to wash away, and the Residency to fall piecemeal about the ears of impotent officials.  And yet though the hereditary favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he has always an eye upon the past.  He showed me where the old public place had stood, still to be traced by random piles of stone; told me how great and fine it was, and surrounded on all sides by populous houses, whence, at the beating of the drums, the folk crowded to make holiday.  The drum-beat of the Polynesian has a strange and gloomy stimulation for the nerves of all.  White persons feel it—­at these precipitate sounds their hearts beat faster; and, according to old residents, its effect on the natives was extreme.  Bishop Dordillon might entreat; Temoana himself command and threaten; at the note of the drum wild instincts triumphed.  And now it might beat upon these ruins, and who should assemble?  The houses are down, the people dead, their lineage extinct; and the sweepings and fugitives of distant bays and islands encamp upon their graves.  The decline of the dance Stanislao especially laments.  ‘Chaque pays a ses coutumes,’ said he; but in the report of any gendarme, perhaps corruptly eager to increase the number of delits and the instruments of his own power, custom after custom is placed on the expurgatorial index.  ’Tenez, une danse qui n’est pas permise,’ said Stanislao:  ’je ne sais pas pourquoi, elle est tres jolie, elle va comme ca,’ and sticking his umbrella upright in the road, he sketched the steps and gestures.  All his criticisms of the present, all his regrets for the past, struck me as temperate and sensible.  The short term of office of the Resident he thought the chief defect of the administration; that officer having scarce begun to be efficient ere he was recalled.  I thought I gathered, too, that he regarded with some fear the coming change from a naval to a civil governor.  I am sure at least that I regard it so myself; for the civil servants of France have never appeared to any foreigner as at all the flower of their country, while her naval officers may challenge competition with the world.  In all his talk, Stanislao was particular to speak of his own country as a land of savages; and when he stated an opinion of his own, it was with some apologetic preface, alleging that he was ‘a savage who had travelled.’  There was a deal, in this elaborate modesty, of honest pride.  Yet there was something in the precaution that saddened me; and I could not but fear he was only forestalling a taunt that he had heard too often.