taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both
her hands. 'Tenez--a little baby like this; then dead. All the
Kanaques die. Then no more.' The smile, and this instancing by
the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me
strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the
husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled
to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had
just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw
their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day
already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more
of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary
works and no more readers.



CHAPTER IV--DEATH



The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the
Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is
perhaps the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height
of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in
action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and
duller, are still comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no
race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands. When
Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the
inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the
same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual
natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman