For much there is that is fair in the lives of the Typees. Dwelling on that enchanted island of the Pacific, their lines are cast in pleasant places. The asperities which civilization seems rather to have aggravated than smoothed do not roughen their way. Their existence is passed in the midst of tropical plenty, on which their numbers, few and hot on the increase, make light demand. They toil not to cover what nature has conceived in innocence, and spin but lightly to adorn what nature has fashioned fair. Little thought do they take on their housing. “There are few villages,” Melville tells us, “the houses stand here and there in the shadow of groves or are scattered along the banks of the winding stream; their bamboo sides and their gleaming white thatch forming a beautiful contrast to the perpetual verdure in which they are embowered. There are no roads of any kind in the valley; nothing but a labyrinth of foot paths twisting and turning without end.” Yet the morals of these people do not seem to have been so far below our standards as their benighted condition might lead us to expect. “There seemed,” says Melville, “to be no rogues of any sort in Typee. In the darkest nights the natives slept securely with all their worldly wealth around them, in houses the doors of which were never fastened. The disquieting thought of theft and assassination never disturbed them. Each islander reposed beneath his own palmetto thatching, or sat under his own breadfruit tree, with none to molest or alarm him. There was not a padlock in the valley.”