OF THE SOUTH SEAS 497 



squares or separate divisions. Babies lay at their 

 mothers' .extended feet, and others ran about the room 

 in silence. The pastor's sermon was about loba and 

 his tefa pua, which he scraped with poa, the shells of the 

 beach. He pictured the man of patience as if in Tau- 

 tira, with his three faithless friends, Elifazi, Bilidadi, 

 and Tof ari, urging him to deny God and to sin ; and the 

 speaker struck the railing with his fist when he enumer- 

 ated the possessions taken from loba by God, but re- 

 turned a hundredfold. After he had finished, wiping 

 the sweat from his brow with a colored kerchief ,* the 

 himene began. 



The only advance we have made since the Greeks is 

 in music. Possibly in painting we have better mediums ; 

 but in philosophy, poetry, sculpture, decency, beauty, 

 we have not risen. We cure diseases more skilfully, but 

 we have more ; in health we are crippled by our cities and 

 our customs. Our violins and pianos, our orchestras 

 and symphonies, are our great achievements ; but in these 

 South Seas, where they do not count, the people had 

 evolved a mass utterance of canticles more thrilling and 

 more enjoyable than the oratorios of Europe. In these 

 himenes one may see transfigured for moments the soul 

 of the Polynesian ascending above the dust of the west, 

 which smothers his articulation. 



A woman in the center of a row suddenly struck a 

 high note, beginning a few words from a hymn, or an 

 improvisation. She sang through a phrase, and then 

 others joined in, singly or in pairs or in tens, without 

 any apparent rule except close harmony. These voices 

 burst in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some 

 high, some low, some singing words, and others merely 



