uns like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes
to pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the
trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was
nearly full. So long as the circus was there, so long as the _Casco_ was
yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his visit; and to
this end every woman must have a new dress, and every man a shirt and
trousers. Never before, in Mr. Regler's experience, had they displayed
so much activity.

In their despondency there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts
and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian;
not least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was
condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern,
sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last
departed, wrung the _Cascos_ by the hand as for a final separation.
Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the
nocturnal roadside; I was told by one they were like so much mist, and
as the traveller walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another
described them as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from
none could I obtain the smallest clearness as to what they did, or
wherefore they were dreaded. We may be sure at least they represent the
dead; for the dead, in the minds of the islanders, are all-pervasive.
"When a native says that he is a man," writes Dr. Codrington, "he means
that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast.
The intelligent agents of this world are to his mind the men who are
alive, and the ghosts the men who are dead." Dr. Codrington speaks of
Melanesia; from what I have learned his words are equally true of the
Polynesian. And yet more. Among cannibal Polynesians a dreadful
suspicion rests generally on the dead; and the Marquesans, the greatest
cannibals of all, are scarce likely to be free from similar beliefs. I
hazard the guess that the Vehinehae are the hungry spirits of the dead,
continuing their life's business of the cannibal ambuscade, and lying
everywhere unseen, and eager to devour the living. Another superstition
I picked up through the troubled medium of Tari Coffin's English. The
dead, he told me, came and danced by night around the paepae of their
former family; the family were thereupon overcome by some emotion (but
whether of pious sorrow or of fear I could not gather), and must "make a
feast," of