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, reminded me continually of the days
of Lovat and Struan. Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a
touchy punctilio, are common to both races: common to both tongues the
trick of dropping medial consonants.

Here is a table of two widespread Polynesian words:--

House. Love.[1]

Tahitian FARE AROHA
New Zealand WHARE
Samoan FALE TALOFA
Manihiki FALE ALOHA
Hawaiian HALE ALOHA
Marquesan HA'E KAOHA

The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan
instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots.
Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called catch,
written with an apostrophe, and often or always the gravestone of a
perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to this day. When a Scot
pronounces water, better, or bottle--_wa'er, be'er_, or _bo'le_--the
sound is precisely that of the catch; and I think we may go beyond, and
say, that if such a population could be isolated, and this
mispronunciation should become the