to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had

just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw

their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day

already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more

of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary

works and no more readers.

CHAPTER IV--DEATH

The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the

Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is

perhaps the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height

of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in

action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and

duller, are still comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no

race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands. When

Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the

inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the

same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual

natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman

Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but

two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both

Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the

christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must

have been neglected: 'He shall be able to see,' 'He shall be able

to tell,' 'He shall be able to charm,' said the friendly

godmothers; 'But he shall not be able to hear,' exclaimed the last.

The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred, when

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