angry pleasantries--'Here is a mighty fine ship,' said he, 'to have

no money on board!' I own I was inspired with sensible repugnance;

even with alarm. The ship was manifestly in their power; we had

women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that

they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of

timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence might else

have reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the usual

instigators and accomplices of native outrage? When he reads this

confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile.

Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was

filled from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned

generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me

in silence with embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are

large, luminous, and melting; they are like the eyes of animals and

some Italians. A kind of despair came over me, to sit there

helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a

corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and a kind of rage to

think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like

furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien

planet.

To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to

cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify

his diet. But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman

empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose

laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and

preventing. I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had

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