e popoi?_" she asked. I told her it was too cold, and went through
an elaborate performance, shutting out draughts, and crouching over an
imaginary fire, to make sure she understood. But she understood right
well; remarked it must be bad for the health, and sat a while gravely
reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows. I am sure it roused her
pity, for it struck in her another thought always uppermost in the
Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me
out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people. "_Ici
pas de Kanaques_," said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she
held it out to me with both her hands. "_Tenez_--a little baby like
this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more." The smile, and
this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood
affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile
the husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled
to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had just
brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw their case
as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day already numbered when
there should be no more Beretani, and no more of any race whatever, and
(what oddly touched me) no more literary works and no more readers.

CHAPTER IV

DEATH

The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the
Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is perhaps
the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height of males;
they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in action, graceful in
repose; and the women, though fatter and duller, are still comely
animals. To judge by the eye, there is no race more viable; and yet
death reaps them with both hands. When Bishop Dordillon first came to
Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but
newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his
fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to
readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque mis-spelling of Hapar.
There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any
genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have
been neglected: "He shall be able to see," "He shall be able to tell,"
"He shall be able to charm," said the friendly godmothers