ed it to the sepulchre forgot the spot.

In the very old days the Marquesans interred the dead secretly in
the night at the foot of great trees. Or they carried the bodies to
the mountains and in a rocky hole shaded by trees covered them over
and made the grave as much as possible like the surrounding soil.
The secret of the burial-place was kept inviolate. Aumia's husband
related an instance of a man who in the darkest night climbed a
supposedly inaccessible precipice carrying the body of his young
wife lashed to his back, to place it carefully on a lofty shelf and
descend safely.

These precautions came probably from a fear of profanation of the
dead, perhaps of their being eaten by a victorious enemy. To
devastate the cemeteries and temples of the foe was an aim of every
invading tribe. It was considered that mutilating a corpse injured
the soul that had fled from it.

Afraid of no living enemy nor of the sea, meeting the shark in his
own element and worsting him, fearlessly enduring the thrust of the
fatal spear when an accident of battle left him defenseless, the
Marquesan warrior, as much as the youngest child, had an unutterable
horror of their own dead and of burial-places, as of the demons who
hovered about them.

Christianity has made no change in this, for it, too, is encumbered
with such fears. Who of us but dreads to pass a graveyard at night,
though even to ourselves we deny the fear? Banshees, werwolves and
devils, the blessed candles lit to keep away the Evil One, or even
to guard against wandering souls on certain feasts of the dead, were
all part of my childhood. So to the Marquesan are the goblins that
cause him to refuse to go into silent places alone at night, and
often make him cower in fear on his own mats, a _pareu_ over his head,
in terror of the unknown.

But death when it comes to him now is nothing, or it is a going to
sleep at the end of a sad day. Aumia, eating her burial meats and
looking with pleasure at her coffin, carefully and beautifully built
by her husband's hands, smiled at me as serenely as a child. But the
melancholy sound of her coughing followed me up the trail to the
House of the Golden Bed.

It was barely daylight next morning when I awoke, a soft, delicious
air stirring the breadfruit leaves. I plunged into the river, and
returning to my house was about to dress--that is, to put on my
_pareu_--when a shriek arose from the forest. It was sudden, sharp,
and agonizing.