Читать книгу Men Against the Sea – Book Set. The Greatest Maritime Adventure Novels: The Bounty Trilogy, Lost Island, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, The Far Lands, Tales of the South Seas… онлайн

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“Why not marry her, if she is willing?” asked Hitihiti, when I had done.

“I think she might be willing, but what would her parents say?”

“She has none; both are dead.”

“Vehiatua then.”

“He likes you.”

“Very well. But suppose we were married, and an English ship came with orders that I must go home.”

My taio shrugged his great shoulders in despair. “You English are all alike,” he said impatiently; “you make yourselves miserable by thinking of what may never happen! Is not to-day enough, that you must think of to-morrow and the day after that? The thought of an English ship makes you hesitate to marry the girl you fancy! And ten years, or twenty, might pass before another ship arrives! Enough of such talk! Yesterday is gone; you have to-day; to-morrow may never come!”

I could not help smiling at my old friend’s philosophic outburst, not without its grain of sound common sense—called “common” because it is so rare. Worry over the future is without doubt the white man’s greatest strength and greatest weakness in his quest of happiness—the only conceivable object in life. To the people of Tahiti, worry over the future was unknown; their language indeed contained no word with which to express such an idea.