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Updated: May 23, 2025
We descended by the route we had come, picking up her shoes and stockings and our hats by our couch, and with the princess leading, hurrying along the obscuring trail. We passed a Tahitian youth who had been gathering feis, probably near the tarn, and who was bringing them to the market of the next morning.
We ate in the old day the simple things at hand, fish and breadfruit, feis and cocoanut milk, mangoes and bananas and oranges. Now we eat the dirty and prepared food of the Tinito, the Chinaman, and we depend on coffee and rum and beer for strength. The thin wheat bread has no nourishment compared with the breadfruit and the fei, the yam and the taro. And clothes!
The people flocked to the well as they might to a Feis to see the dipping of the shepherd boy. Cries of merriment arose among them when the boy, bound in strips of hide, was lowered by the servants of the Keeper of the Key into the mouth of the great well. It was a cold, dark, creepy place down in the shaft of the well, the walls reeking, covered with slimy green lichen, the waters roaring.
And so, I think, are most of the others. One more example to illustrate the quality of Leamy's style say, the description of the contest of the bards before the High King at the Feis of Tara in the story called "The Huntsman's Son."
The old Feis of the nation are not here alluded to; they had very little in common with modern Parliaments, being merely assemblies of the chief heads of clans, to which were added in Christian times the prelates of the Church.
In earlier days, the Ard-Righ, on his election, or in an emergency, made an armed procession through the island. Ordinarily, however, his suffragans visited him, and not he them; all Ireland went up to Tara to the Feis, or to the festivals of Baaltine and Samhain.
"Once when a crowd of us went to visit 'im, 'e ran up this tr'il a'ead of us, and when we arrived all winded, blow me up a bloomin' gum-tree if 'e 'ad n't a mess of feis and breadfruit cooked for us." We came to a sign on the trail. "Tapu," it said, which means taboo, or keep away; and farther on a notice in French that the owner forbade any one to enter upon his land.
The feis, gigantic bananas of coarse fiber, which must be cooked, are about a foot in length, and three inches in diameter, and grow in immense, heavy bunches in the mountains, so that obtaining them is great labor. They are wild creatures of heights, and love the spots most difficult of access. Only barefooted men can reach them. These feis are a separate species.
On the forward deck, under a spot of awning, five Kanakas, who made up the crew, were squatted round a basin of fried feis, and drinking coffee from tin mugs. "Eight bells: knock off for breakfast!" cried the captain, with a miserable heartiness. "Never tried this craft before; positively my first appearance; guess I'll draw a bumper house."
They hadn't a shilling, and Tahia built a hut in the hills up there near where the nature men live, and put him in it, and she fed and cared for him. She went to the mountains for feis she came down here to the reef to fish, and she found eggs and breadfruit in other people's gardens. She kept him alive, the Lord knows how, until he could secure money from Sydney to go home and die.
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