ning and found the one long chamber
spacious, cool, and perfumed with the forest odors. There were no
furnishings save two large and brilliantly polished cocoanut-tree
trunks running the whole length of the interior, and between them
piles of mats of many designs and of every bright hue that roots and
herbs will yield.

While I admired these, noting their rich colors and soft, yet firm,
texture, a murmurous rustle on the palm-thatched roof announced the
coming of the rain. It was unthinkable to my host that a stranger
should leave his house at nightfall, and in a downpour that might
become a deluge before morning. To have refused his invitation had
been to leave a pained and bewildered household.

_Popoi_ bowls and wooden platters of the roasted breadfruit were
brought within shelter, and while the hissing rain put out the fires
on the _paepae_ the candlenuts were lighted and all squatted for the
evening meal. Breadfruit and yams, with a draught of cocoanut milk,
satisfied the hunger created by my arduous climb. Then the women
carried away the empty bowls while my host and I lay upon the mats
and smoked, watching the gray slant of the rain through the
darkening twilight.

Few houses like his remained on Hiva-Oe, he said in reply to my
compliments. The people loved the ways of the whites and longed for
homes of redwood planks and roofs of iron. For himself, he loved the
ways of his fathers, and though yielding as he must to the payments
of taxes and the authority of new laws, he would not toil in the
copra-groves or work on traders' ships. His father had been a
warrior of renown. The _u'u_ was wielded no more, being replaced by
the guns of the whites. The old songs were forgotten. But he, who
had traveled far, who had seen the capital of the world, Tahiti, and
had learned much of the ways of the foreigner, would have none of
them. He would live as his fathers had lived, and die as they had
died.

"It is not long. We vanish like the small fish before the hunger of
the _mako_. The High Places are broken, and the _pahue_ covers our
_paepaes_. It does not matter. _E tupu te fau; e toro to farero, e
mou te taata._ The hibiscus shall grow, the coral shall spread, and
man shall cease. There is sleep on your eyelids, and the mats are
ready."

His hospitality would give me the place of honor, despite my protests,
and soon I found myself lying between my host and his wife, while
the other members of the household lay in se