ved jurisdiction; but I
forged excuses, telling myself she had perhaps little to lament, perhaps
suffered much, perhaps understood nothing. And lo! in the whole affair
there was no question whether of tenderness or piety, and the sturdy
return of this old remnant was a mark either of uncommon sense or of
uncommon fortitude.

Yet one thing had occurred that partly set me on the trail. I have said
the funeral passed much as at home. But when all was over, when we were
trooping in decent silence from the graveyard gate and down the path to
the settlement, a sudden inbreak of a different spirit startled and
perhaps dismayed us. Two people walked not far apart in our procession:
my friend Mr. Donat--Donat-Rimarau--"Donat the much-handed"--acting
Vice-Resident, present ruler of the archipelago, by far the man of chief
importance on the scene, but known besides for one of an unshakable good
temper; and a certain comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the
comeliest on the isle, not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite.
Of a sudden, ere yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she
made a leap at the Resident, with pointed finger shrieked a few words
and fell back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth. "What did she
say to you?" I asked. "She did not speak to _me_," said Donat, a shade
perturbed; "she spoke to the ghost of the dead man." And the purport of
her speech was this: "See there! Donat will be a fine feast for you
to-night."

"M. Donat called it a jest," I wrote at the time in my diary. "It seemed
to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as though she would
divert the ghost's attention from herself. A cannibal race may well have
cannibal phantoms." The guesses of the traveller appear foredoomed to be
erroneous; yet in these I was precisely right. The woman had stood by in
terror at the funeral, being then in a dread spot, the graveyard. She
looked on in terror to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit,
loosed upon the isle. And the words she had cried in Donat's face were
indeed a terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to
dedicate another in her stead. One thing is to be said in her excuse.
Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great
good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-caste.
For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of talisman
against the powers of hell. In no other way can they explain the
unpunishe