loping furthest in it, and customs, refinements,
and leisure reaching their highest pitch in the marvelous culture,
savage though it was, which astounded the Europeans. Yet all these
people remained curious as to what might be beyond the distance,
and a hundred years ago were fitting out exploring expeditions to
search for Utupu, a Utopia from which the god Tao introduced the
cocoanut-tree. They looked to the westward for the mystic land of
their forefathers, as from Ireland to India the happy isles of the
west was a myth. The mariners of Erin had long seen the Tir-n'an-Oge
just beyond the horizon.

The Tahitians had a legend of the god Maui, that "he brought the earth
up from the depths of the ocean, and when mankind suffered from the
prolonged absence of the sun and lived mournfully in obscurity, with
no ripening fruits, Maui stopped the sun and regulated its course,
so as to make day and night equal, as they are in Tahiti."

Does not this hark back to a clime where the inequality of day and
night was greater than in the tropics?

Lieutenant Bovis of the French navy, who seventy years ago, after
ten years of study in Tahiti, wrote his conclusions, said that
after him it would be useless to hunt in the memories of the living
for anything of the past, for the old men were dead or dying, and
those now in middle age did not even speak or understand the old
language in which the records were told. He had, he said, arrived
in Tahiti when the real Tahiti, the Tahiti of the true native, the
Tahiti unspoiled by European civilization, was only a memory, but
by years of labor he had taken from the lips of the venerable their
recollections of conditions in their childhood and early manhood,
and what their fathers had told them, and by comparison he had been
able to write intelligently of former times.

If Bovis found the real Tahiti no longer existent seventy years ago,
what must I look for when two generations or three had died since,
and swift steamships coursed where only the clipper had sailed? Yet
Tahiti was the least spoiled of islands on liner routes, because France
being so far from it, and the French such poor business men, they had
not exploited the natives except in the way of taxes. The bureaucracy
lived on the imposts, but they had not reformed the people by laws
and punishments, and made them see the wisdom of acquiescence in a
scheme of regular work, as had the British missionary government in
Tahiti and the A