eight. I was twenty, and Taputea was the first South Sea Island I'd ever seen. We came in about this time in the evening, and long before we'd rounded that point dozens and dozens of natives came swimming off to us. I can't begin to tell you what a fine lot they were! Since then I've seen every kind of native in the Pacific, but none of 'em could hold a candle to these. But I remember as we were coming in to the anchorage Captain Pritchardold George Pritchard, the man I named this vessel after- told me just about what I've been telling you. "This place is done for," he said. "You ought to have seen it twenty years ago." Very likely some other skipper told him the same thing twenty years before that. I'd like to have been the first white man that ever saw the place, back in the old days.

"The worst of it was,' he continued, 'that all through these islands the first white men were nearly always missionaries. I've got no use for that tribe! I suppose it's because I've had to carry so many back and forth. I've heard too many songs of Zion rising over the deep. Little they cared about the old days! What they wanted was the New Jerusalem, with all the inhabitants dressed in white trousers and black Mother Hubbards, going to prayer meeting with Bibles under their arms. They meant well, I suppose, but Lord deliver me from your well-meaning people! He did n't deliver these poor heathen. You can see what's You can see what's happened - they're all dead. When I first came there were still three or four hundred living in this one valley. Now I could take all that's left aboard my schooner and still have room to spare.'

'But are n't you a little unfair in blaming this on the missionaries?'

'Not at all! Not the least bit! You remember the old song:

Shall we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Shall we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?

That's the missionary spirit! It always has been and it always will be. They'll save your soul if they have to kill you to do it! They believe there's only one lamp of life and that they've got it; so they snuff yours out.

'I said just now that I could take all the people there are left in this valley aboard my schooner and have room to spare. It's a fact; I could. Do you know how many there are? Eighteen, and five of those are white. There's Mr. Cowden; old La Motte, the government agent; Rudge, the Protestant missionary; Father Gilbert, the Catholic; and Sister Theresa at the convent. The rest are natives, all in a state of grace except two an old man and woman that live a good way up the valley. They're pure heathen. The missionaries have been trying to save them for years, but they've had no luck. More power to that old couple! If ever they give in-well, Mr. Cowden will have to find someone else to bring him his mail. I'll never come to Taputea again. Hello! There's a light. That'll be Mr. Cowden.'

He walked to the companionway.

"Tihoti! We'll have kaikai on deck this evening; and fetch up those sacks of mail out of my cabin.'

I waited with a good deal of curiosity to see this lonely man who had spent the better part of twenty years at Taputea, 'studying crabs or snails.' He hailed us from a distance and came alongside, rowing vigorously. Having made fast his skiff, he clambered aboard with the agility of a boy. He was about sixty, with a white moustache, thick white hair, and a deeply tanned, healthy skin.

'Well, Captain,' he said, 'I thought you were never coming.'

"Yes, we're a little late, Professor. But you know how it is at this time of year- no wind. Until yesterday we have n't made a fair day's run the whole voyage. Meet my first-class passenger. He's having a look round the islands. I was just telling him that he 's forty years too late.'

'Later than that, much later. However, Taputea has its attractions even to-day. I would n't have believed it possible to become so attached to a place.'

Then, excusing himself, "This is my first mail since last November,' — he emptied on the deck the sacks we had brought him and made a hasty examination of their contents. I noticed that the bulk of his mail was made up of periodicals and parcels of books. These last he examined eagerly. 'By Jove!' he exclaimed as he opened one of them. 'Here's a piece of luck! Captain, do you remember my speak ing of Lieutenant Collingwood, who came to Taputea in the Resolute, in 1832? He wrote a Memoir of that visit. I've had every bookseller in England and America searching for it, and here it is at last! Edwards, of London, discovered it. That man is a marvel! Give him time and I believe he could unearth the lost books of Livy!'

He was immensely pleased with his good fortune, and talked of it all through supper. He now had everything, he said, which had been written about Taputea from the very earliest days.

'Are there many volumes?' I asked. 'No, not a great many; thirty-odd, not counting the missionaries' records. But they are all extraordinarily interesting.'

'Well,' said the captain, 'I would n't give you three ha'pence for all the missionaries have written.'

Mr. Cowden laughed.

'You may have discovered,' he said

to me, 'that the captain is a little violent on the subject of missionaries? Strange, is n't it, that traders nearly always are? They could n't have made a living anywhere in the Pacific if missionaries had not prepared the way, and yet they see red the moment the name is mentioned.'

'You're right, Professor, we certainly do and with good reason. I've never held that traders were any great blessing to savages, but they believe in living and letting live, and that's more than you can say for the best missionary that ever drew breath. Is n't that so? Come now! What's your honest opinion?'

'On the question, "The Trader versus the Missionary as a Civilizing Influence"? It's an old controversy, Captain. It seems hardly worth while reopening it in these days.'

'Well, traders have one thing to their credit - a sense of humor. When I look at Taputea and see what white men have done to it - traders, missionaries, all of us together, in the name of God and the Higher Civilization I could laugh if it was n't so downright tragical. But take old Rudge or Father Gilbert; they're still exhorting away and sending up prayers of thanksgiving that the heathen have all been saved. I'd hate to be left in this place with those two for company! How do you manage, Professor?'

'You forget, Captain, that I'm not a trader. Missionaries are not my hereditary enemies. Rudge is n't, perhaps, the sort of man I would choose for a companion, but Father Gilbert can be quite interesting if you can start him on matters outside religion.'

'How's he getting on with his dictionary?'

'Oh, famously! He's halfway through the letter K now.'

The captain laughed scornfully.
'You know,' he said, turning to me,

'Father Gilbert has been writing his dictionary of the Taputean language for the last twenty-five years, and by the time he's finished there'll be no one left to speak it but himself, Mr. Cowden, and me.'

'You're forgetting Rudge, La Motte, and Sister Theresa. Well, Captain, I must be going. What are your plans? You'll not be leaving at once, I hope?'

'No. I want to take in a supply of firewood, and to-morrow afternoon I'll give the sailors a run ashore. We'll sail sometime Sunday morning, very likely.'

'In that case, what about shore leave for the first-class passenger? Would you like to come?' he added, turning to me. "There's plenty of room at my house, and to-morrow you might enjoy a walk around the settlement.'

I accepted the invitation with pleasure. It was a warm starlit night, so profoundly still that long after we had left the ship I heard one of the sailors there singing softly to himself. We passed around the end of a ruined pier and entered a river with immense trees overarching it from either bank. Hardly a gleam of light came through the interlacing branches. Presently we brought up before a flight of stone steps descending into the water, where the skiff was made fast.

It was so dark there that I did not see the man seated at the top of the steps until Mr. Cowden switched on his flash-lamp. He was a native, a very old man, naked to the waist, and wearing a pair of knee-length cotton drawers. His white hair was closely cropped, and a band of tatooing across his eyes had precisely the appearance of a mask. He rose as we approached, and stood leaning on a paddle. I noticed then that his whole body was covered with tatooing in curious and intricate designs. When Mr. Cowden spoke to

him he made a barely perceptible gesture of assent by raising his eyebrows; otherwise one would have thought that he had not observed us at all, and as we passed he stood gazing sombrely over our heads toward the opposite bank of the river.

My host preceded me through an arched gateway opening into a garden overgrown with weeds. Just before we reached the house he stopped.

'Has the captain told you of the old heathen Father Gilbert and Mr. Rudge have been trying to save for so many years? Well, that's the man. He has no use for any of us, though he tolerates me, after a fashion, because I furnish him with tobacco. You should see his manner of accepting my small favors, like a king receiving tribute from a petty prince. Jove! I feel petty, too, in his presence. You noticed his height? He is six feet four. Imagine this island in the old days filled with men of that stamp!'

He led the way then into a spacious two-story dwelling, with upper and lower balconies all round. It was in a sorry state of repair. Heavy wooden shutters hung askew; the pillars supporting the balconies were crumbling away, and large fragments of plaster had fallen from walls and ceilings. Mr. Cowden occupied three rooms on the upper floor. These had been comfortably furnished, and were in the agreeable state of disorder of most bachelor establishments. When the lamps had been lighted my host sorted over his mail.

'I'll not bother with this to-night,' he said. 'I've only three or four letters to get off-plenty of time to-morrow; but if you don't mind I'll just glance through this volume of Collingwood's. Here are some magazines that might interest you.'

He lit his pipe and stretched out on a sofa with his book, while I turned over

the pages of monthly and weekly reviews, some of which I had read in America long before. There were articles on religion, politics, social questions, criticisms of novels and volumes of poetry, and in all of them I was conscious of a recurring note of cynicism, of disillusionment as plainly discernible as the melancholy laughter of a trombone in a 'Blues' symphony. I made a brief extract in my notebook of one critical article a review of an anthology of verse called American Poetry since 1900. "There are more than five hundred professional poets,' the critic began, 'practising their trade in America at this moment! So solemn a thought must make anyone pause.' He then paused at length, to consider the contents of the volume, and having quoted and commented through two columns he came to the following conclusion: 'Futility, vulgarity, overconsciousness of the one, blindness to the other- these are the two things that weigh upon our time. With no dreams left that they can agree to value deeply, men either hold dear what is cheap or turn in weariness from all. While we cast our voices across the Atlantic without having anything to say; while we fly across continents in a day without knowing what to do when we have arrived, this is the sort of literature we produce. Wireless and aeroplanes are the poetry of our age, mustard gas and high explosives the stage-properties of its tragic genius; but of memorials outlasting bronze we have raised ourselves but few.'

'Well!' said Mr. Cowden, closing his book with a sharp clap, 'I'm going to have a rare time reading Collingwood. It's interesting to find that he bears out what all the other explorers and travelers have said of the beauty of life at Taputea in the old days. It must have been so. It's impossible to doubt it in the face of such unanimous

opinion. Have you read anything about the island?'

'One or two old books,' I replied. 'Otherwise my knowledge is limited to what I've seen and heard to-day.'

'I can imagine what you've heard, with respect to missionaries in particular. I often take issue with the captain on that question; but, you know, I think he's right. I doubt whether there has ever been, elsewhere, a primitive race so utterly and quickly destroyed by the Christian Church as the inhabitants of this island. That's a broad statement. One might talk until doomsday without convincing a churchman of the truth of it. Various causes contributed to the disappearance of these people, but there is not the slightest doubt that the missionaries bear by far the larger part of the responsibility.

'You know, very likely, that the group to which Taputea belongs was among the last in Polynesia to resist the encroaching whites. The natives had an instinctive distrust of us from the first, more deeply ingrained than is often the case with a primitive people. When representatives of the first Mission Society attempted to establish themselves here, the result was utter failure. The two men chosen to work this virgin field were Israel Thompson, described in the record as a "bootmaker," and William Creel, "gentleman's servant and since tin-worker." Nearly the whole complement of saints on the mission ship were fanatical, narrow-minded, ignorant people, with an appalling conviction of the sacredness of their cause. The natives would have nothing to do with them, and small wonder, for they were a proud, intelligent race for all their primitive culture, and they were not long in discovering the truth the truth that they were superior to the men who had come to them as teachers and preceptors. And they learned as quickly that the purpose of

-

the missionaries was nothing less than to overthrow their society and to establish in its stead a civilization as joyless as it was ugly and alien. Well, as I have said, the first attempt was a failure, but the missionaries had the horrible persistence of their kind. They came again and again, and when peaceable methods failed they resorted to force. They were landed under cover of the guns of warships. The natives accepted them then because there was no alternative.

"The result was the inevitable one. The missionaries set to work at once to destroy the tapu a system of laws, half secular, half religious, which constituted the only restraints the natives knew. These restrictions were always enforced and rarely violated. They covered every phase of human life, from the insurance of an adequate food-supply to the worship of the gods and the Levitical code governing childbirth or marriage with a relative. All of this was destroyed, as it had to be if Christianity was to thrive; and that is why I say that the Church is as guilty with respect to these people as though it had lined them up in their thousands and shot them down. Take from any nation its religion, its secular law, the tradition and immemorial custom which have all the binding effect of law what is there left? What happens? Precisely what has happened here.

'Think of it! This wholesale desolation has taken place in one man's lifetime! The old native we met last night has witnessed the greater part of it. He remembers the last of the tribal wars. The Taputeans had wars, of course, but compared with ours they were as innocent as boys' mimic battles. In the old days, although they had bows and arrows, these were only for sport. It was considered ignoble to use them in warfare, which was a man-to

man adventure. And here is another thing to their credit: they abhorred infanticide, the system of birth-control which was practised by other branches of the Polynesian family. Children were welcomed, cherished, and almost spoiled by love. Strangely enough, during their centuries of isolation Nature seems to have adjusted matters so that the men far outnumbered the women. Their marriage customs, which so shocked the early missionaries, were undoubtedly better suited to their tribal life than the monogamy which was the white man's substitute. Each woman had two husbands at least a young man who was her lover, and an older man to provide for her. The position of women was high among them; they might rule as chiefs in default of men

'Am I boring you with all this?' he asked suddenly. 'What started me anyway? Oh yes - Collingwood's book.'

'Please go on,' I replied. "Tell me something more of the people. Cook, as I remember it, called them the finest race in the Pacific. Was that true, do you think?'

'Yes, I think it was. If there were time for you to go through these books of mine you would be impressed by the unanimity of opinion on that point. Every explorer, without exception, who visited the island in former times, described the inhabitants in terms of almost extravagant praise. Naturally enough, the women came in for the larger share of it. Mendaña said they were lovelier than the famous beauties of Lima, and you may remember the later account of Cook's surgeon. He declared the women to be the most beautiful he had ever seen, and that the race as a whole surpassed any nation in Europe in physical perfection. Even the missionaries were reluctantly impressed by their beauty. A droll incident occurred when they first came here.