And yet there was one touch of the
pathetic haunted me: that so much youth and expectation should have run
in these starved veins, and the man should have squandered all his lees
of life on a pleasure party.

On the morning of 17th September the sufferer died, and, time pressing,
he was buried the same day at four. The cemetery lies to seaward behind
Government House; broken coral, like so much road-metal, forms the
surface; a few wooden crosses, a few inconsiderable upright stones,
designate graves; a mortared wall, high enough to lean on, rings it
about; a clustering shrub surrounds it with pale leaves. Here was the
grave dug that morning, doubtless by uneasy diggers, to the sound of the
nigh sea and the cries of sea-birds; meanwhile the dead man waited in
his house, and the widow and another aged woman leaned on the fence
before the door, no speech upon their lips, no speculation in their
eyes.

Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped in
white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind--not many, for not
many remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these were poor;
the men in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or the gorgeous
parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women, with a few
exceptions, brightly habited. Far in the rear came the widow, painfully
carrying the dead man's mat; a creature aged beyond humanity, to the
likeness of some missing link.

The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone with
the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and a layman
took his office. Standing at the head of the open grave, in a white coat
and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and one eye bound with a
red handkerchief, he read solemnly that chapter in Job which has been
read and heard over the bones of so many of our fathers, and with a good
voice offered up two prayers. The wind and the surf bore a burthen. By
the cemetery gate a mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue.
In the midst the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the
coffin-stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned
her back to the grave and was playing with a leaf. Did she understand?
God knows. The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered and
threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral. Dust to
dust: but the grains of this dust were gross like cherries, and the true
dust that was to follow sat near by, still