to travellers. When I desired any detail of savage custom, or of
superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my fathers, and
fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism:
Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater's head, the second-sight, the
Water Kelpie,--each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the
black bull's head of Stirling procured me the legend of Rahero; and
what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts,
enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the Tevas
of Tahiti. The native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship
grew warmer, and his lips were opened. It is this sense of kinship
that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content
himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown. And the
presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk
in clouds of darkness.

The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the
west of the beach and the spring of the impending mountains. A
grove of palms, perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as
for a triumph) with fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour.
A road runs from end to end of the covert among beds of flowers,
the milliner's shop of the community; and here and there, in the
grateful twilight, in an air filled with a diversity of scents, and
still within hearing of the surf upon the reef, the native houses
stand in scattered neighbourhood. The same word, as we have seen,
represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a shade of
difference, the abode of man. But although the word be the same,
the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among
the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most
commodiously lodged. The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses
of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the