348 MYSTIC ISLES 



Does not this hark back to a clime where the in- 

 equality of day and night was greater than in the 

 tropics ? 



Lieutenant Bovis of the French navy, who seventy 

 years ago, after ten years of study in Tahiti, wrote his 

 conclusions, said that after him it would be useless to 

 hunt in the memories of the living for anything of the 

 past, for the old men were dead or dying, and those now 

 in middle age did not even speak or understand the old 

 language in which the records were told. He had, he 

 said, arrived in Tahiti when the real Tahiti, the Tahiti 

 of the true native, the Tahiti unspoiled by European 

 civilization, was only a memory, but by years of labor 

 he had taken from the lips of the venerable their recol- 

 lections of conditions in their childhood and early man- 

 hood, and what their fathers had told them, and by com- 

 parison he had been able to write intelligently of former 

 times. 



If Bovis found the real Tahiti no longer existent sev- 

 enty years ago, what must I look for when two genera- 

 tions or three had died since, and swift steamships 

 coursed where only the clipper had sailed? Yet Tahiti 

 was the least spoiled of islands on liner routes, because 

 France being so far from it, and the French such poor 

 business men, they had not exploited the natives except 

 in the way of taxes. The bureaucracy lived on the im- 

 posts, but they had not reformed the people by laws and 

 punishments, and made them see the wisdom of acqui- 

 escence in a scheme of regular work, as had the British 

 missionary government in Tahiti and the American mis- 

 sionary government in Hawaii, in the name of an aveng- 

 ing and critical Lord. No people believed in the dignity 



