she was.

"She cut off her hair," answered Lovaina, "like I do when my l'i'l boy
was killed in cyclone nineteen huner' six. It never grow good after
like before." Her hair was quite two feet long and very luxuriant,
and like all Tahitian hair, simply in two plaits.

Brooke expressed his curiosity over what Lovaina had said, "jus'
like all T'ytee woman."

"Was that a custom of Tahiti mothers, to bury their babes alive at
birth?" he asked.

Lovaina blushed.

"Better you ask Tetuanui 'bout them Arioi," she replied confusedly.

The chief pleaded that he could not explain such a complicated matter
in French, and if he did, M. Considine would not understand that
language. But with the question raised, the conversation continued
about infanticide and depopulation. The chief quoted the death-sentence
upon his race pronounced by the Tahitian prophets centuries ago:

"E tupu te fau, et toro te farero, e mou te taata!"

"The hibiscus shall grow, the coral spread, and man shall cease!"

"There were, according to Captain Cook, sixty or seventy thousand
Tahitians on this island when the whites came," continued the chief,
sadly. "That number may have been too great, for perhaps Tooti
calculated the population of the whole island by the crowd that always
followed him, but there were several score thousand. Now I can count
the thousands on the fingers of one hand."

We talked of the sweeping away of the people of the Marquesas
Islands and of all the Polynesians. The Hawaiians are only twenty-two
thousand. When the haole set foot on shore there, he counted four
hundred thousand.

Time was when so great was the congestion in these islands, as in
the Marquesas and Hawaii, that the priests and chiefs instituted
devices for checking it. Infanticide seemed the easiest way to
prevent hurtful increase. Stringent rules were made against large
families. On some islands couples were limited to two children or
only one, and all others born were killed immediately. Race suicide
had here its simplest form. The Polynesian race must have grown to
very great numbers on every island they settled from Samoa to Hawaii,
and perhaps these numbers induced migrations. They doubtless grew to
threatening swarms before they began checking the increase. Thomas
Carver, professor of political economy at Harvard, says:

Even if the wants of the individual never expanded at all, it is quite
obvious that an indefinite increase in the number