rt of delicious, cooling
refreshment, and we were ready for the oysters and the fish and taro.

Chapter XIX

The Arioi, minstrels of the tropics--Lovaina tells of the
infanticide--Theories of depopulation--Methods of the Arioi--Destroyed
by missionaries.

Lovaina came out to Mataiea with the news and gossip of the capital. A
wretched tragedy had shocked the community. Pepe, the woman of
Tuatini, had buried her new-born infant alive in the garden of the
house opposite the Tiare Hotel. Lovaina was full of the horror of
it, but with a just appreciation of the crime as a happening worth
telling. The chefferie was filled with aues.

"Aue!" cried Haamoura, the chief's wife.

"Aue!" said the chief, and Rupert Brooke, with whom I had been
swimming.

"Aue!" exclaimed O'Laughlin Considine, the Irish poet of New Zealand,
stout, bearded, crowned with a chaplet of sweet gardenias, and quoting
verses in Maori, Gaelic, and English.

There were laments in Tahitian by all about, sorrow that the mother
had so little loved her babe, that she had not brought it to Mataiea,
where Tetuanui and Haamoura or any of us would have adopted it. And
Lovaina said, in English for Considine, whom she had brought to
Mataiea, and for Brooke:

"She had five children by that Tuatini. He is custom-officer at
Makatea, phosphate island, near T'ytee. He been gone one year, an' she
get very fat, but she don' say one thing. Then she get letter speakin'
he come back nex' week. One ol' T'ytee woman she work for her to keep
all chil'ren clean, an' eat, an' she notice two day ago one mornin'
she more thin. She ask her, 'Where that babee?' She say the varua,
a bad devil, take it. The ol' woman remember she hear little cry in
night, an' when a girl live my hotel tell her she saw Pepe diggin'
in garden, she talk and talk, an' by 'n' by police come, an' fin'
babee under rose-bush. It dead, but Cassiou, he say, been breathe
when bury, because have air in lung. Then gendarme take hol' Pepe,
and she tell right out she 'fraid for her husban', an' when babee born
she go in night an' dig hole an' plant her babee under rosebush. Now,
maybe white people say that Pepe jus' like all T'ytee woman."

Lovaina wore a wine-colored peignoir, and in her red-brown hair
many strands of the diaphanous reva-reva, delicate and beautiful, a
beloved ornament taken from the young palm-leaf. O'Laughlin Considine
and Brooke were much concerned for the unhappy mother, and asked how