eak and potatoes, feis,
roast beef or mutton, sucking pig, and cabbage or sauer-kraut. For
dessert there was sponge- or cocoanut-cake. All business in Papeete
opened at seven o'clock and closed at eleven, to reopen from one
until five. Dinner at half-past six o'clock was a repetition of the
late breakfast except that a vegetable or cabbage soup was also served.

Two Chinese youths, To Sen and Hon Son, were the regular waiters,
but were supplemented by Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Akura, Tetua, Maru,
and Juillet, all Tahitian girls or young women who had a mixed status
of domestics, friends, kinfolk, visitors, and hetairae, the latter
largely in the sense of entertainers. I doubt if they were paid more
than a trifle, and they were from the country districts or near-by
islands, moths drawn by the flame of the town to soar in its feverish
heat, to singe their wings, and to grow old before their time, or to
grasp the opportunity to satiate their thirst for foreign luxuries
by semi-permanent alliances with whites.

Lovaina's girls! How their memory must survive with the guests of the
Tiare Hotel! One read of them in every book of travel encompassing
Tahiti. One heard of them from every man who had dropped upon this
beach. Once in Mukden, Manchuria, I sat up half the night while the
American consul and a globe-trotter painted for me the portraits of
Lovaina's girls.

I was atop a disorderly camel named Mark Twain nosing about the Sphinx
when my companion remarked that that stony-faced lady looked a good
deal like Temanu of Lovaina's. Then I had to have the whole story of
Lovaina and her household. I have heard it away from Tahiti a dozen
times and always different.

Doubtless, in the dozen years the gentle Lovaina ministered to the
needs of travelers and residents, many girls came and went in her
house. Some have married, and some have gone away without a ring,
but all have been made much of by those they served, and have lived
gayly and by the way.

Lovaina, herself, said to me:

"You know those girl', they go ruin. That girl you see here few
minutes ago I bring her up just like Christian; be good, be true, do
her prayers, make her soul all right. Then I go San Francisco. What
you think? When I come back she ruin. 'Most break my heart. That man
he come to me, he say: 'Lovaina, I take good care that girl. I love
her.' That girl with him now. She happy, got plenty dress, plenty
best to eat, and nice buggy. I tell you, I give u