dead, and a reflection on the mourner.
Nine times the "ke," fourteen "a's," fifteen "e's," eighteen
"i's" and fifteen "o's" and "u's."

Aumia was carried to Calvary in the afternoon and put in the grave
for which the pig had been paid. So strongly did the old feeling
still prevail that only three or four of her friends could be
persuaded by the nuns to accompany the coffin up the trail.

Exploding Egg's consignment of Aumia to Havaii, the underworld,
spoke strongly of the clinging of his people to their old beliefs in
the destiny of the spirit after death. They share with the Ainos of
Japan--a people to which they have many likenesses, being of the
same division of man--a faith in a subterranean future.

Does not Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often speak of
"going to the world below," where he hopes to find real wisdom?

Havaii or Havaiki is, of course, the fabled place whence came the
Polynesians, as it is also the name of that underworld to which
their spirits return after death. One might read into this fact a
dim groping of the Marquesan mind toward "From dust he came, to dust
returneth," or, more likely, a longing of the exiled people for the
old home they had abandoned. Ethnologists believe that the name
refers to Java, the tarrying-point of the great migration of
Caucasians from South Asia toward Polynesia and New Zealand, or to
Savaii, a Samoan island whence the emigrants later dispersed.

Whatever the origin of the word, to-day it conveys to the Marquesan
mind only that vague region where the dead go. In it there is no
suffering, either for good or bad souls. It is simply the place
where the dead go. It is ruled by Po, the Darkness.

There is, however, a paradise in an island in the clouds, where
beautiful girls and great bowls of _kava_, with pigs roasted to a
turn, await the good and brave. The old priests claimed to be able
to help one from Po to this happy abode, but the living relatives of
the departed spirit had to pay a heavy price for their services. The
Christianized Marquesan fancies that he finds these old beliefs
revived when Pere David tells him of purgatory, from which prayers
and certain good acts help one's friends, or may be laid up in
advance against the day when one must himself descend to that middle
state of souls.

All Marquesans live in the shadow of that day. They see it without
fear, but with a melancholy so tragic and deep that the sorrow of it
is indescribable.

"I