could lift the people now from the slough of despond in which they
expire.

Upon this people, sparkingly alive, spirited as wild horses, not
depressed as were their conquerors by a heritage of thousands of
years of metes and bounds, religion as forced upon them has been not
only a narcotic, but a death potion.

CHAPTER X

The marriage of Malicious Gossip; matrimonial customs of the simple
natives; the domestic difficulties of Haabuani.

Mouth of God and his wife, Malicious Gossip, soon became intimates
of my _paepae_. Coming first to see the marvelous Golden Bed and to
listen to the click-click of the Iron Fingers That Make Words, they
remained to talk, and I found them both charming.

Both were in their early twenties, ingenuous, generous, clever, and
devoted to each other and to their friends. Malicious Gossip was
beautiful, with soft dark eyes, clear-cut features, and a grace and
lovely line of figure that in New York would make all heads whirl.
She was all Marquesan, but her husband, Mouth of God, had white
blood in him. Whose it was, he did not know, for his mother's
consort had been an islander. His mother, a large, stern, and
Calvinistic cannibal, believed in predestination, and spent her days
in fear that she would be among the lost. Her Bible was ever near,
and often, passing their house, I saw her climb with it into a
breadfruit-tree and read a chapter in the high branches where she
could avoid distraction.

They lived in a spacious house set in three acres of breadfruit and
cocoanuts, an ancient grove long in their family. Often I squatted
on their mats, dipping a gingerly finger in their _popoi_ bowl and
drinking the sweet wine of the half-ripe cocoanut, the while Mouth
of God's mother spoke long and earnestly on the abode of the damned
and the necessity for seeking salvation. In return, Malicious Gossip
spent hours on my _paepae_ telling me of the customs of her people
new and old.

"When I was thirteen," she said, "the whalers still came to Vait-hua,
my valley. There came a young _Menike_ man, straight and bright-eyed,
a passenger on a whaling-ship seeking adventure. I sighed the first
time in my life when I looked on him. He was handsome, and not like
other men on your ships.

"The kiss you white men give he taught me to like. He was generous
and gentle and good. Months we dwelt together in a house by the
stream in the valley. When he sailed away at last, as all white men
do who are wo