e he was there till he died. He was bughouse. I don't know
much about painting, but if you call that crazy stuff of Gauguin's
proper painting, then I'm a furbelowed clam."

"Eh bien," Count Polonsky said, with a smile of the man of superior
knowledge, "he is the greatest painter of this period, and his
pictures are bringing high prices now, and will bring the highest
pretty soon. I have bought every one I could to hold for a raise."

Polonsky was a study in sheeny hues. He was twenty-seven, his black
and naturally curled hair was very thin, there were eight or nine
teeth that answered no call from his meat, and he wore in his right
eyesocket a round glass, with no rim or string, held by a puckering
of cheek and brow, giving him a quizzical, stage-like stare, and
twisting his nose into a ripple of tiny wrinkles. He weighed, say,
one hundred pounds or less, was bent, but with a fresh complexion
and active step. I saw him rise naked from his cot one morning, and
the first thing he put on was the rimless monocle. The natives, who
name every one, called him "Matatitiahoe," "the one-windowed man." He
had journeyed about the world, poked into some queer places, and in
Japan had himself tattooed. On his narrow chest he had a terrible
legendary god of Nippon, and on his arms a cock and a skeleton,
the latter with a fan and a lantern. On his belly was limned a
nude woman. He had certain other decorations the fame of which had
been bruited wide so that a keen curiosity existed to see them, and
they were discussed in whispers by white femininity and with many
"Aucs!" of astonishment by the brown. They were Pompeiian friezes in
their unconventionality of subject and treatment.

Llewellyn, McHenry, David, and I accompanied the count to his residence
on the outskirts of Papeete to taste a vintage of Burgundy he had sent
him from Beaune. Like most modern houses in Tahiti, his was solely
utilitarian, and was built by a former American consul. It exactly
ministered to the comforts of a demanding European exquisite. The
house was framed in wide verandas, and was in a magnificent grove
of cocoanut-trees affording beauty and shade, with extensive fields
of sugar-cane on the other side of the road, and a glimpse of the
beach and lagoon a little distance away. A singing brook ran past
the door. The bedrooms were large and open to every breeze, and the
tables for dining and amusement mostly set upon the verandas.

Polonsky's toilet-table w