of saints carried in processions,
and schools opened to regenerate the race of idol-worshippers.

Tai-o-hae saw all the plans of grandeur wane, saw saloons and opium,
vice and disease, fastened upon the natives, and saw the converted,
the old gods overthrown, the new God reigning, cut down like trees
when the fire runs wild in the forest.

The dream of minting the strength and happiness of the giant men of
the islands into gold for the white labor-kings dissolved into a
nightmare as the giants perished. It was hard to make the free
peoples toil as slaves for foreign masters, so the foreign masters
brought opium. To get this "Cause of Wonder Sleep," of more delight
than _kava_, the Marquesan was taught to hoe and garner cotton, to
gather copra and even to become the servant of the white man. The
hopes of the invaders were rosy. They faded quickly. The Marquesans
faded faster. The saloons of Tai-o-hae were gutters of drunkenness.
The _paepaes_ were wailing-places for the dead. No government
arrested vice or stopped the traffic in death-dealing drugs until too
late. Then, with no people left to exploit, the colonial ministers
in Paris forgot the Marquesas.

In the lifetime of a man, Tai-o-hae swelled from a simple native
village with thousands of healthy, happy people, to the capital of
an archipelago, with warships, troops, prisons, churches, schools,
and plantations, and reverted to a deserted, melancholy beach, with
decaying, uninhabited buildings testifying to catastrophe. Since
Kahuiti, my man-eating friend of Taaoa, was born, the cycle had been
completed.

I was on my way now to see, in Tai-o-hae, a man who was giving his
life to bring the white man's religion to the few dying natives who
remained.

At dusk the wind died, and we put out the oars. Hour after hour the
rowers pulled, chanting at times ancient lays of the war-canoes, of
the fierce fights of their fathers when hundreds fed the sharks
after the destruction of their vessels by the conquerors, and of the
old gods who had reigned before the white men came. Pere Victorien
listened musingly.

"They should be singing of the Blessed Mother or of Joan," he said
with sorrow. "But when they pull so well I cannot deny them a thread
of that old pagan warp. Those devils whom they once worshipped wait
about incessantly for a word of praise. They hate the idea that we
are hurrying to the mission, and they would like well to delay us."

Whatever the desires of t