The long leaves of the palmetto drooped over the eaves, and through them you saw the warrior holding his paddle with both hands in the act of rowing, leaning forward and inclining his head, as if eager to hurry on his voyage.

Glaring at him forever, and face to face, was a polished human skull, which crowned the prow of the canoe.

The spectral figurehead, reversed in its position, glancing backwards, seemed to mock the impatient attitude of the warrior.
When I first visited this singular place with Kory-Kory, he told me--or at least I so understood him--that the chief was paddling his way to the realms of bliss, and bread-fruit--the Polynesian heaven--where every moment the bread-fruit trees dropped their ripened spheres to the ground, and where there was no end to the cocoanuts and bananas: there they reposed through the livelong eternity upon mats much finer than those of Typee; and every day bathed their glowing limbs in rivers of cocoanut oil.

In that happy land there were plenty of plumes and feathers, and boars'-tusks and sperm-whale teeth, far preferable to all the shining trinkets and gay tappa of the white men; and, best of all, women far lovelier than the daughters of earth were there in abundance.
'A very pleasant place,' Kory-Kory said it was; 'but after all, not much pleasanter, he thought, than Typee.' 'Did he not then,' I asked him, 'wish to accompany the warrior ?' 'Oh no: he was very happy where he was; but supposed that some time or other he would go in his own canoe.' Thus far, I think, I clearly comprehended Kory-Kory.

But there was a singular expression he made use of at the time, enforced by as singular a gesture, the meaning of which I would have given much to penetrate.
I am inclined to believe it must have been a proverb he uttered; for I afterwards heard him repeat the same words several times, and in what appeared to me to be a somewhat: similar sense.