with dismay the approaching extinction of his
race. The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with
him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality
awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets
the reality with relief. He does not even seek to support a
disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and
communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave.
Hanging is now the fashion. I heard of three who had hanged themselves
in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though
this be a common form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas, I
cannot think it will continue popular in the Marquesas. Far more
suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the
fruit of the eva, which offers to the native suicide a cruel but
deliberate death, and gives time for those decencies of the last hour,
to which he attaches such remarkable importance. The coffin can thus be
at hand, the pigs killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already
through the house; and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is
conscious of achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like
Caesar's) adjusted for the final act. Praise not any man till he is dead,
said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners, might be
the Marquesan parody. The coffin, though of late introduction, strangely
engages their attention. It is to the mature Marquesan what a watch is
to the European schoolboy. For ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the
fathers; at last, but the other day, they let her have her will, gave
her her coffin, and the woman's soul is at rest. I was told a droll
instance of the force of this preoccupation. The Polynesians are subject
to a disease seemingly rather of the will than of the body. I was told
the Tahitians have a word for it, _erimatua_, but cannot find it in my
dictionary. A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to succumb to
this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their houses, turned
them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two days has seen them
cured. But this other remedy is more original: a Marquesan, dying of
this discouragement--perhaps I should rather say this acquiescence--has
been known, at the fulfilment of his crowning wish, on the mere sight of
that desired hermitage, his coffin--to revive, recover, shake off the
hand of death, and be restored for year