The official affairs of the chefferie, beyond the repair of roads and bridges, were few.  Crime among Tahitians being almost unknown, the chief’s duties as magistrate were negligible, and the family uttered many aues when I related to them the conditions of our countries, with murders, assaults, burglaries and rapine as daily news.  The French law required a civil ritual for marriage, and Tetuanui tied the legal knots in his district.  I was at the chefferie when a union was performed.  The bride and groom were of the middle class of prosperous landholders.  They arrived in an automobile wonderfully adorned with flowers, with great bouquets of roses and ferns on the lamps.  They were accompanied by cars and carriages filled with their families and friends.  The bride was in a white-lace dress from Paris, with veil and orange-blossoms, and the groom in a heavy black frock-coat over white drill trousers with lemon-colored, tight shoes; both looking very ill at ease and hot.  The father of the groom must have us to the church and to the wedding feast, so Brooke and I rode in a cart, I on the mother’s lap, and the poet on the knees of the father.  The jollity of the arearea was already apparent, and the father vainly whipped his horse to outspeed the automobile.  All the vehicles raced along the road and into the yard of the Protestant church of Mataiea at top gait.

It was the season of assemblage of the manu patia, the wasps brought from abroad, and quite ten thousand were clustered on the church ceiling, while thousands more patrolled the air just over our heads, courting and quarreling, buzzing and alighting on our heads and necks.  The preacher in a knee-length Prince Albert of black wool, opened so that I saw he had nothing but an undershirt beneath, recited the ceremony and addressed the couple.  He took a ring from his trousers-pocket, unwrapping and opening its box.  A bridesmaid in a rose-colored satin gown had taken off the bride’s glove, and the pastor put the ring upon her finger.  A number of young men acted as aids and witnesses, and all who stood were pounced upon by the wasps.  They betrayed no evidence of nervousness, but at the installation of the ring, the groom, with a desperate motion, tore off his stiff collar and bared his robust neck.  He did not replace it that day.  The bride’s mother wept upon my shoulder throughout the quarter of an hour.  Not a trace was indicated of the old wedding customs of the Tahitians, as Christianity had effaced them rigorously, and though the Tahitians had had plenty of ceremonies for all public acts, as had the Greeks and Romans, many had been forgotten under the scourge of orthodoxy before any white wrote freely of the island.  They are lost to record with the old language.