sation in song about him. She praised
his descent from his mother, his strength, his capacity for rum,
and especially his power over women. He was own brother to the great
ones of the Bible, Tolomoni and Nebutodontori, who had a thousand
wives. He drew all women to him.

The dance was a gambol of passion. It was a free expression
of uninhibited sex feeling. The Hawaiian hula, the nautch, and
minstrelsy combined. So rapid was the movement, so fast the music,
so strenuous the singing, and so actual the vision of the dancer,
that she exhausted herself in a few minutes, and another took the turf.

A thousand years the Tahitians had had these upaupahuras. Their
national ballads, the achievements of the warrior, the fisherman, the
woodsman, the canoe-builder, and the artist, had been orally recorded
and impressed in this manner in the conclaves of the Arioi. Dancing
is for prose gesture what song is for the instinctive exclamation
of feeling, and among primitive peoples they are usually separated;
but those cultured Tahitians from time immemorial had these highly
developed displays of both methods of manifesting acute sensations. The
Kamchadales of the Arctic--curious the similarities of language and
custom between these far Northerners and these far Southerners--danced
like these Tahitians, so that every muscle quivered at every moment.

The dancing in the bower was at intervals, as the desire moved
the performers and bodily force allowed. The himene went on
continuously, varying with the inspiration of the dancer or the
whim of the accordion-player. They snatched this instrument from
one another's hands as the mood struck them, and among the natives,
men and women alike had facility in its playing. Pepe of Papara,
and Tehau of Papeari, their eyes flashing, their bosoms rising and
falling tumultuously, and their voices and bodies alternating in
their expressions of passion, were joined by Temanu of Lovaina's, the
oblique-eyed girl whom they called a half-Chinese, but whose ancestral
tree, she said, showed no celestial branch. Temanu was tall, slender,
serpent-like, her body flexuous and undulatory, responding to every
quaver of the music. Her uncorseted figure, with only a thin silken
gown upon it, wreathed harmoniously in tortile oscillations, her long,
black hair flying about her flushed face, and her soul afire with
her thoughts and simulations.

Now entered the bower Mamoe of Moorea, a big girl of eighteen. She was