photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their
everyday costumes and physiognomies, had become transformed, in
three weeks' sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign;
alien faces, barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered,
in the swerving cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise. Her
Majesty was often recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss
her photograph; Captain Speedy--in an Abyssinian war-dress,
supposed to be the uniform of the British army--met with much
acceptance; and the effigies of Mr. Andrew Lang were admired in the
Marquesas. There is the place for him to go when he shall be weary
of Middlesex and Homer.
It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth
some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands.
Not much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same
convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In
both cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the
chiefs deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of
regarding money as the means and object of existence. The
commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound to an age of war
abroad and patriarchal communism at home. In one the cherished
practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume,
proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off: beef, driven under
cloud of night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving
Highlander; long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man-
eating Kanaka. The grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and
resentments, the alarms and sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs,
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