life to bring the white man's religion to the few dying natives who
remained.

At dusk the wind died, and we put out the oars. Hour after hour the
rowers pulled, chanting at times ancient lays of the war-canoes, of
the fierce fights of their fathers when hundreds fed the sharks
after the destruction of their vessels by the conquerors, and of the
old gods who had reigned before the white men came. Père Victorien
listened musingly.

"They should be singing of the Blessed Mother or of Joan," he said
with sorrow. "But when they pull so well I cannot deny them a thread
of that old pagan warp. Those devils whom they once worshipped wait
about incessantly for a word of praise. They hate the idea that we
are hurrying to the mission, and they would like well to delay us."

Whatever the desires of those devils, they were balked, for the wind
came fair during the second night, and when the second dawning came
we were in the bay of Tai-o-hae.

It was a basin of motionless green water, held in the curve of a
shore shaped like a horseshoe, with two huge headlands of rock for
the calks. The beach was a rim of white between the azure of the
water and the dark green of the hills that rose steeply from it.
Above them the clouds hung in varying shapes, here lit by the sun to
snowy fleece, there black and lowering. On the lower slopes a few
houses peeped from the embowering _parau_ trees, and on a small hill,
near the dismantled fort, the flag of France drooped above the
gendarme's cabin.