are considered highly poisonous.  Early in the morning, it is narrated, aged and malicious persons creep into the sleeping village, and stealthily make water at the doors of the houses of young men.  Thus they propagate disease; thus they breathe on and obliterate comeliness and health, the objects of their envy.  Whether horrid fact or more abominable legend, it equally depicts that something bitter and energetic which distinguishes Paumotuan man.

The archipelago is divided between two main religions, Catholic and Mormon.  They front each other proudly with a false air of permanence; yet are but shapes, their membership in a perpetual flux.  The Mormon attends mass with devotion:  the Catholic sits attentive at a Mormon sermon, and to-morrow each may have transferred allegiance.  One man had been a pillar of the Church of Rome for fifteen years; his wife dying, he decided that must be a poor religion that could not save a man his wife, and turned Mormon.  According to one informant, Catholicism was the more fashionable in health, but on the approach of sickness it was judged prudent to secede.  As a Mormon, there were five chances out of six you might recover; as a Catholic, your hopes were small; and this opinion is perhaps founded on the comfortable rite of unction.

We all know what Catholics are, whether in the Paumotus or at home.  But the Paumotuan Mormon seemed a phenomenon apart.  He marries but the one wife, uses the Protestant Bible, observes Protestant forms of worship, forbids the use of liquor and tobacco, practises adult baptism by immersion, and after every public sin, rechristens the backslider.  I advised with Mahinui, whom I found well informed in the history of the American Mormons, and he declared against the least connection.  ‘Pour moi,’ said he, with a fine charity, ’les Mormons ici un petit Catholiques.’  Some months later I had an opportunity to consult an orthodox fellow-countryman, an old dissenting Highlander, long settled in Tahiti, but still breathing of the heather of Tiree.  ‘Why do they call themselves Mormons?’ I asked.  ‘My dear, and that is my question!’ he exclaimed.  ’For by all that I can hear of their doctrine, I have nothing to say against it, and their life, it is above reproach.’  And for all that, Mormons they are, but of the earlier sowing:  the so-called Josephites, the followers of Joseph Smith, the opponents of Brigham Young.

Grant, then, the Mormons to be Mormons.  Fresh points at once arise:  What are the Israelites? and what the Kanitus?  For a long while back the sect had been divided into Mormons proper and so-called Israelites, I never could hear why.  A few years since there came a visiting missionary of the name of Williams, who made an excellent collection, and retired, leaving fresh disruption imminent.  Something irregular (as I was told) in his way of ‘opening the service’ had raised partisans and enemies; the church was once more rent asunder;