them and the smaller octopi.

When they were cooked, a trough of _popoi_ and one of _feikai_, or
roasted breadfruit mixed with a cocoanut-milk sauce, were placed on
the sand, and all squatted to dine. For a quarter of an hour the
only sounds were the plup of fingers withdrawn from mouths filled
with _popoi_, and the faint creaming of waves on the beach.
Marquesans feel that eating is serious business. The devil-fish and
crabs were the delicacies, and served as dessert. Blackened by the
fire, squid and crustacean were eaten without condiment, the
tentacles being devoured as one eats celery. I was soon satisfied,
and while they lingered over their food and smoked I strolled up the
valley a little way, still feeling the pressure of that severed arm.

Hana Hevane had its people one time. They vanished as from a hundred
other valleys, before the march of progress. The kindly green of the
jungle had hidden the marks of human habitations, where once they had
lived and loved and died.

Only the bones of _La Corse_, the schooner Jerome Capriata had
sailed many years, lay rotting under a grotesque and dark banian,
never more to feel the foot of man upon the deck or to toss upon the
sea. A consoling wave lapped the empty pintles and gave the decaying
craft a caress by the element whose mistress she so long had been.
Her mast was still stepped, but a hundred centipedes crawled over
the hull.

When I returned to the fire, the boatmen were talking. Ugh! Dried-up
Stream! his stomach full and smoke in his mouth, bethought himself
of a tale, an incident of this very spot. In a sardonic manner he