extraordinary consonance with the
native mind.

The Protestant temple held a hundred and fifty people. It was a
plain hall, with doors opposite each other in the middle, and at
one end a slightly raised platform on which sat the pastor and half
a dozen deacons. The pastor was delivering his sermon as I entered,
he and all his entourage in black Prince-Albert coats. He had a white
shirt and collar and tie, but others masked a pareu under the wool,
and were barelegged. All wore solemn faces of a jury bringing in a
death-verdict. Paiere nodded to a volunteer janitor, who insisted
upon my occupying a chair he brought.

Every one else was on the floor on mats, in two squares or separate
divisions. Babies lay at their mothers' extended feet, and others
ran about the room in silence. The pastor's sermon was about Ioba
and his tefa pua, which he scraped with poa, the shells of the
beach. He pictured the man of patience as if in Tautira, with his
three faithless friends, Elifazi, Bilidadi, and Tofari, urging him
to deny God and to sin; and the speaker struck the railing with his
fist when he enumerated the possessions taken from Ioba by God, but
returned a hundredfold. After he had finished, wiping the sweat from
his brow with a colored kerchief, the himene began.

The only advance we have made since the Greeks is, in music. Possibly
in painting we have better mediums; but in philosophy, poetry,
sculpture, decency, beauty, we have not risen. We cure diseases
more skilfully, but we have more; in health we are crippled by our
cities and our customs. Our violins and pianos, our orchestras,
and symphonies, are our great achievements; but in these South Seas,
where they do not count, the people had evolved a mass utterance of
canticles more thrilling and, more enjoyable than the oratorios of
Europe. In these himenes one may see transfigured for moments the
soul of the Polynesian ascending above the dust of the west, which
smothers his articulation.

A woman in the center of a row suddenly struck a high note, beginning
a few words from a hymn, or an improvisation. She sang through a
phrase, and then others joined in, singly or in pairs or in tens,
without any apparent rule except close harmony. These voices burst
in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some high, some low, some
singing words, and others merely humming resonantly, a deep, booming
bass. The surf beating on the reef, the wind in the cocoanut-trees,
entered into t