134 EASTER ISLAND. 



give them shelf room for their shadow of a name, yet it would puzzle 

 even such an one to recall their titles. But " Typee" is the history of 

 the Marquesas, the geography of Nukahiva, the story of savage life 

 before it had begun that change into new conditions which has proved 

 fatal. Memory holds the picture of a tattered copy of the first edition 

 of "Typee," picked up on the Broom road in Tahiti at a debit for ten 

 sous or some such trifling matter, dragged from a pile of undistinguished 

 lumber. Its cover, for but one was left, still showed patches of the 

 canary-colored glazed paper with which it must have made a fine show 

 in booksellers' windows when it came fresh from the presses. It was 

 riddled with thread holes, marks of the gnawing insect life of the Pacific 

 which goes through literature far more consistently from cover to cover 

 than mere human readers. A shabby little book, a frowsy beachcomber 

 of a book fallen on its evil days, just the worth of perhaps tihu. But 

 pocket companion of the arduous scramble to the knife edge of the 

 mountain crest which captures the wet clouds over Taiohae, there it 

 showed its worth, which had outlived the neglect of man and had with- 

 stood the gnawing of the beetle. As in its pages, so before the eye lay 

 the valley of the Typees and the valley of the Happars, or, since the 

 restlessness of orthography has reached the uttermost sea, we are now 

 to designate them as the valleys of Haapa and Taipi. What matters it? 

 The same authority which establishes our new spelling shows the vanity 

 of it all, "Haapa, now almost entirely extinct;" "Taipi, now almost 

 depopulated." Soon the only Marquesans alive will be Mehivi and 

 Kory-Kory and Marheyo, and Fayaway forever flitting in the fragrant 

 avenues of the humid forest. 



It is depressing to write of these islands of Southeast Polynesia; we 

 may not escape the mortuary and the monumental ; the pen arm is for- 

 ever condemned to wear the brassard. We can not finish the briefest 

 sketch of Rapanui, of Mangareva, of the Paumotu, of Tahiti, of the 

 Marquesas, without touching upon the obituary of each folk in its turn. 

 They die, placidly, uncomplainingly; they fade before the bright light 

 of the higher civilization which takes all from them and can give them 

 nothing in return for the joy of living of which it has robbed them. I 

 recall the saying of an aged Maori to Featherstone : "As the Maori rat 

 dies before the Pakeha rat ; as the Maori fly dies before the Pakeha fly, 

 as the Maori grass dies before the Pakeha grass, so dies the Maori before 

 the Pakeha." It is a sense of personal loss, I have known the Poly- 

 nesian so well, the lilt of his life has so much with which I am attuned in 

 unison. In an earlier work I mentioned with reverent affection the 

 Polynesian debt which I owe to Dana. It came to me to study the 

 South Sea as the meet and proper end of my formal education. But to 

 that call I might not have given heed had there not been the draft of 

 earlier sentiment of attraction. On my desk, as I write the chapters of 

 these studies of a most interesting language group, lies the fillip to my 

 zeal, the mottled shell of a cowrie. It has been with me in the South 



