old lady in every
quarter of the earth. The next moment she had taken Stanislao's arm,
and they moved off along the pier in the moonlight, leaving me
bewildered. This was a queen of cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to
foot, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so
that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the
sights of Tai-o-hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had
been fought for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she
had sat on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while
the drums were going twenty strong and the priests carried up the
blood-stained baskets of long-pig. And now behold her, out of that past
of violence and sickening feasts, step forth, in her age, a quiet,
smooth, elaborate old lady, such as you might find at home (mittened
also, but not often so well-mannered) in a score of country houses. Only
Vaekehu's mittens were of dye, not of silk; and they had been paid for,
not in money, but the cooked flesh of men. It came in my mind with a
clap, what she could think of it herself, and whether at heart, perhaps,
she might not regret and aspire after the barbarous and stirring past.
But when I asked Stanislao--"Ah!" said he, "she is content; she is
religious, she passes all her days with the sisters."

Stanislao (Stanislaos, with the final consonant evaded after the
Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America, and
there educated by the fathers. His French is fluent, his talk sensible
and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he is of excellent
service to the French. With the prestige of his name and family, and
with the stick when needful, he keeps the natives working and the roads
passable. Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt what would
become of the present regimen in Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might
not be suffered to close up, the pier to wash away, and the Residency to
fall piecemeal about the ears of impotent officials. And yet, though the
hereditary favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he
has always an eye upon the past. He showed me where the old public
place had stood, still to be traced by random piles of stone; told me
how great and fine it was, and surrounded on all sides by populous
houses, whence, at the beating of the drums, the folk crowded to make
holiday. The drumbeat of the Polynesian has a strange and gloomy
stimulation for t