d.

Hardly one of these garments survives in the Marquesas to-day. They
have been driven out by the gaudy prints of Germany and England
brought by the traders, and by the ideas of dress which the
missionaries imported together with the barrels of hideous
night-gown garments contributed by worthy ladies of American villages.

The disappearance of these native garments brought two things,
idleness and the rapid spread of tuberculosis. The _tapa_ cloth
could not be worn in the water or the rain, as it disintegrated.
Marquesans therefore left their robes in the house when they went
abroad in stormy weather or bathed in the sea. But in their new
calicos and ginghams they walked in the rain, bathed in the rivers,
and returned to sleep huddled in the wet folds, ignorant of the
danger.

As the _tapa_ disappeared, so did the beautiful carvings of canoes
and paddles and clubs, superseded by the cheaper, machine-made
articles of the whites. Little was left to occupy the hands or minds
of the islanders, who, their old merrymakings stopped, their wars
forbidden, their industry taken from them, could only sit on their
_paepaes_ yawning like children in jail and waiting for the death
that soon came.

The Marquesans never made a pot. They had clay in their soil, as
Gauguin proved by using it for his modeling, but they had no need of
pottery, using exclusively the gourds from the vines, wooden vessels
hollowed out, and temporary cups of leaves.

This absence of pottery is another proof of the lengthy isolation of
the islands. The Tongans had earthen ware which they learned to
make from the Fijians, but the Polynesians had left the mainland
before the beginning of this art. Thus they remained a people who
were, despite their startling advances in many lines, the least
encumbered by useful inventions of any race in the world.

Until hardly more than a hundred years ago the natives were like our
forefathers who lived millenniums ago in Europe. But being in a
gentler climate, they were gentler, happier, merrier, and far cleaner.
One can hardly dwell in a spirit of filial devotion upon the relation
of our forefathers to soap and water, but these Marquesans bathed
several times daily in dulcet streams and found soap and emollients
to hand.

It was curious to me to reflect, while Pere Olivier and I stood
watching the two aged crones beating out the _tapa_ cloth, upon what
slender chance hung the difference between us. Far in the remo