f the highest, perhaps seven
hundred or a thousand feet above the beach, a Virgin looks
insignificantly down, like a poor lost doll, forgotten there by a giant
child. This laborious symbol of the Catholics is always strange to
Protestants; we conceive with wonder that men should think it worth
while to toil so many days, and clamber so much about the face of
precipices, for an end that makes us smile; and yet I believe it was the
wise Bishop Dordillon who chose the place, and I know that those who had
a hand in the enterprise look back with pride upon its vanquished
dangers. The boys' school is a recent importation; it was at first in
Tai-o-hae, beside the girls'; and it was only of late, after their joint
escapade, that the width of the island was interposed between the sexes.
But Hatiheu must have been a place of missionary importance from before.
About midway of the beach no less than three churches stand grouped in a
patch of bananas, intermingled with some pine-apples. Two are of wood:
the original church, now in disuse; and a second that, for some
mysterious reason, has never been used. The new church is of stone, with
twin towers, walls flangeing into buttresses, and sculptured front. The
design itself is good, simple, and shapely; but the character is all in
the detail, where the architect has bloomed into the sculptor. It is
impossible to tell in words of the angels (although they are more like
winged archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in
the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited
relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a
protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so
innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense--in the sense of
inventive gusto and expression--so artistic. I know not whether it was
more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a
barbarous isle, or to see a building so antique still bright with
novelty. The architect, a French lay brother, still alive and well, and
meditating fresh foundations, must have surely drawn his descent from a
master-builder in the age of the cathedrals; and it was in looking on
the church of Hatiheu that I seemed to perceive the secret charm of
mediaeval sculpture; that combination of the childish courage of the
amateur, attempting all things, like the schoolboy on his slate, with
the manly perseverance of the artist who does not know when he is
co