"Honi was tattooed. Not like Marquesans, but like some white sailors,
he had certain marks on him. Grandfather saved these marks, and wore
them as a _tiki_, or amulet, until he died, when he gave it to me. He
had preserved the skin so that it did not spoil."

Haabunai yawned and said his mouth was parched from much talking,
but when a shell of rum was set before him and he had drunk, he
fetched from his house the _tiki_. It was as large as my hand, dark
and withered, but with a magnifying glass I could see a rude cross
and three letters, I H S in blue.

"Grandfather became a Christian and was no longer an _enata Ttaikaia_,
an eater of men, but he kept the _tiki_ always about his neck,
because he thought it gave him strength," said my guest.

I handed him back the gruesome relic, though he began advances to
make it my property. For the full demijohn he would have parted with
the _tiki_ that had been his grandfather's, but I had no fancy for it.
One can buy in Paris purses of human skin for not much more than one
of alligator hide.

"Honi must have been very tough," I said.

"He must have been," Haabunai said regretfully. "Grandfather had his
teeth to the last. He would never eat a child. Like all warriors he
preferred for vengeance's sake the meat of another fighter."

He had not yet sprung the grim jest of almost all cannibalistic
narratives. I did not ask if Honi's wife had eaten of him, as had
Tahia of her white man. It is probable that she did, and that they