48 MYSTIC ISLES 



As I strolled past the houses, every one greeted me 

 pleasantly. 



"la ora na," they said, or "Bonjour!" I replied in 

 kind. I had not been a day in Tahiti before I felt kin- 

 dled in me an affection for its dark people which I had 

 never known for any other race. It was an admixtm-e 

 of friendship, admiration, and pity — of affection for 

 their beautiful natures, of appreciation of the magnifi- 

 cence of their physical equipment, and of sympathy for 

 them in their decline and inevitable passing under the 

 changed conditions of environment made by the sudden 

 smothering of their instinctive needs in the sepia of com- 

 mercial civilization. I saw that those natives remain- 

 ing, laughing and full of the desire for pleasure as they 

 were, must perish because unfit to survive in the morass 

 of modernism in which they were sinking, victims of a 

 system of life in which material profits were the sole 

 goal and standard of the rulers. 



The Tahitians are tall, vigorous, and superbly 

 rounded. The men, often more than six feet or even 

 six and a half feet in height, have a mien of natural 

 majesty and bodily grace. They convey an impression 

 of giant strength, reserve power, and unconscious poise 

 beyond that made by any other race. American In- 

 dians I have known had much of this quality when resi- 

 dent far from towns, but they lacked the curving, pad- 

 ded muscles, the ease of movement, and, most of all, the 

 smiling faces, the ingratiating mamier, of these children 

 of the sun. 



The Tahitians' noses are fairly flat and large; the 

 nostrils dilated; their lips full and sensual; their teeth 

 perfectly shaped and very white and sound; their chins 



