xing of a stiff drink
of absinthe with lemonade or limeade. The learned man who added this
death-dealing potion to the pleasures of the thirsty was Stevenson's
friend, and attended him in his last illness. I do not know whether
Dr. Funk ever mixed his favorite drink for R.L.S., but his own fame
has spread, not as a healer, but as a dram-decocter, from Samoa to
Tahiti. "Dr. Funk!" one hears in every club and bar. Its particular
merits are claimed by experts to be a stiffening of the spine when
one is all in; an imparting of courage to live to men worn out by
doing nothing.

The governor in gala attire was again the urban host, assisted by
Andre Bauda, now his close friend and confidant. Bauda himself had
been in the island only a few months, and knew no more Marquesan
speech than the governor. Both these officials were truly hospitable,
embarrassingly so, considering my inability to keep up with them in
their toasts.

Soon the demijohn of rum had been emptied into the glasses passing
from hand to hand in the garden; Haabunai and Song of the
Nightingale again evoked the thrumming beat of the great drums, and
the dance began. This was a tragedy of the sea, a pantomine of
danger and conflict and celebration. For centuries past the
ancestors of these dancers had played it on the Forbidden Height.
Even the language in which they chanted was archaic to this
generation, its words and their meanings forgotten.

The women sat upon the grass in a row, and first, in dumb show, they
lifted and carried from its house to the beach a long canoe. The
straining muscles of their arms, the sway of their bodies, imitated
the raising of the great boat, and the walking with its weight, the
launching, the waiting for the breakers and the undertow that would
enable them to pass the surf line, and then the paddling in rough
water.

Meantime at a distance the men chanted in chorus, giving rhythmic
time to the motions of the dancers and telling in the long-disused
words the story of the drama. And the drums beat till their rolling
thunder resounded far up the valley.

After the canoe was moving swiftly through the water the women rested.
It seemed to me that the low continued chant of the men expressed a
longing for freedom, for a return to nature, and a melancholy comment
on the days of power and liberty gone forever. Though no person
present understood the ancient language of the song, there was no
need of words to interpret the exact me