comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the comeliest on the isle,
not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite. Of a sudden, ere
yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she made a leap at
the Resident, with pointed finger, shrieked a few words, and fell
back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth. 'What did she say
to you?' I asked. 'She did not speak to ME,' said Donat, a shade
perturbed; 'she spoke to the ghost of the dead man.' And the
purport of her speech was this: 'See there! Donat will be a fine
feast for you to-night.'

'M. Donat called it a jest,' I wrote at the time in my diary. 'It
seemed to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as
though she would divert the ghost's attention from herself. A
cannibal race may well have cannibal phantoms.' The guesses of the
traveller appear foredoomed to be erroneous; yet in these I was
precisely right. The woman had stood by in terror at the funeral,
being then in a dread spot, the graveyard. She looked on in terror
to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit, loosed upon the
isle. And the words she had cried in Donat's face were indeed a
terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to dedicate
another in her stead. One thing is to be said in her excuse.
Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great
good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-
caste. For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of
talisman against the powers of hell. In no other way can they
explain the unpunished recklessness of Europeans.



CHAPTER VI--GRAVEYARD STORIES