ectile.

I saw that it was a breadfruit and that I was under the greatest
tree of that variety I had ever seen, a hundred feet high and
spreading like a giant oak. In the topmost branches was the
tottering beldame I had saluted, and in both her hands the staff, a
dozen feet long. She was threshing the fruit from the tree with
astounding energy and agility, her scanty rags blown by the wind,
and her emaciated, naked figure in its arboreal surroundings like
that of an aged ape.

How she held on was a mystery, for she seemed to lean out from a
limb at a right angle, yet she had but a toe-hold upon it. No part
of her body but her feet touched the branch, nor had she any other
support but that, yet she banged the staff about actively and sent
more six-pounders down, so that I fled without further reflection.

The score of houses strung along the upper reaches of Atuona Valley
were silent at this hour, and everywhere native houses were decaying,
their falling walls and sunken roofs remembering the thousands who
once had their homes here. Occasionally in our own country we see
houses untenanted and falling to ruin, bearing unmistakable
evidences of death or desertion, and I have followed armies that
devastated a countryside and slew its people or hunted them to the
hills, but the first is a solitary case, and the second, though full
of horror, has at least the element of activity, of moving and
struggling life. The rotting homes of the Marquesan people speak
more eloquently of death than do sunken graves.

In these vales, which each held a thousand or several thousand when
the blight of the white man came, the abandoned _paepaes_ are solemn
and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over
them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them.
Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes;
neighbors have removed their few chattels, and the wilderness has
claimed its own. In every valley these dark monuments to the
benefits of civilization hide themselves in the thickets.

None treads the stones that held the houses of the dead. They are
_tapu_; about them flit the _veinahae_, the _matiahae_, and the
_etuahae_, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the
corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish
phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit
upon the _paepae_ of the last Marquesan.

I reached the top of the gulch and paused t