s to his occupations--carving
tikis (idols), let us say, or braiding old men's beards. From all this
it may be conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches
naturally. I heard one example, grim and picturesque. In the time of the
small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had no
thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived in it for
near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the passers-by,
talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for himself and
careless of the friends whom he infected.

This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to
the Marquesan. What is peculiar is the widespread depression and
acceptance of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the dance
languishes, the songs are forgotten. It is true that some, and perhaps
too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if there were spirit
to support or to revive them. At the last feast of the Bastille,
Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the inanimate performance
of the dancers. When the people sang for us in Anaho, they must
apologise for the smallness of their repertory. They were only young
folk present, they said, and it was only the old that knew the songs.
The whole body of Marquesan poetry and music was being suffered to die
out with a single dispirited generation. The full import is apparent
only to one acquainted with other Polynesian races; who knows how the
Samoan coins a fresh song for every trifling incident, or who has heard
(on Penrhyn, for instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight
to twelve keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song
following another without pause. In like manner, the Marquesan, never
industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production. The exports
of the group decline out of all proportion even with the death-rate of
the islanders. "The coral waxes, the palm grows, and man departs," says
the Marquesan; and he folds his hands. And surely this is nature. Fond
as it may appear, we labour and refrain, not for the reward of any
single life, but with a timid eye upon the lives and memories of our
successors; and where no one is to succeed, of his own family, or his
own tongue, I doubt whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato
practise virtue. It is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should
sometimes rouse the Marquesan from his lethargy. Over all the landward
shore of Anaho cotton r