grove of palms, perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as

for a triumph) with fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour.

A road runs from end to end of the covert among beds of flowers,

the milliner's shop of the community; and here and there, in the

grateful twilight, in an air filled with a diversity of scents, and

still within hearing of the surf upon the reef, the native houses

stand in scattered neighbourhood. The same word, as we have seen,

represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a shade of

difference, the abode of man. But although the word be the same,

the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among

the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most

commodiously lodged. The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses

of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the

polite Samoan--none of these can be compared with the Marquesan

paepae-hae, or dwelling platform. The paepae is an oblong terrace

built without cement or black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty

feet in length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and

accessible by a broad stair. Along the back of this, and coming to

about half its width, runs the open front of the house, like a

covered gallery: the interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in

its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an endlong coaming,

some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one

of White's sewing-machines the only marks of civilization. On the

outside, at one end of the terrace, burns the cooking-fire under a

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