ng a schooner. Landers's father's partner was first named
Taporo-Tane because he exported limes in large quantities from Tahiti
to New Zealand. The stevedores and roustabouts of the waterfront made
ballads of happenings as their forefathers had chants of the fierce
adventures of their constant warfare. They were like the negroes,
who from their first transplantation from Africa to America had put
their plaints and mystification in strange and affecting threnodies
and runes.

All through the incessant himenes a crowd of natives kept moving
about a hundred feet away, dancing or listening with delight. They
would not obtrude on the feast, but must hear the music intimately.

The others of our party, having breakfasted until well after two,
sought a house where Llewellyn was known. McHenry and I followed
the road which circles the island by the lagoon and sea-beach. In
that twelve leagues there are a succession of dales, ravines, falls
precipices, and brooks, as picturesque as the landscape of a dream. We
walked only as far as Urufara, a mile or two, and stopped there at
the camp of a Scotsman who offered accommodation of board and lodging.

His sketchy hotel and outhouses were dilapidated, but they were in
the most beautiful surrounding conceivable, a sheltered cove of the
lagoon where the swaying palms dipped their boles in the ultramarine,
and bulky banana-plants and splendid breadfruit-trees formed a temple
of shadow and coolth whence one might look straight up the lowering
mountain-side to the ghostly domes, or across the radiant water to
the white thread of reef.

We met McTavish, the host of the hotel, an aging planter, who kept
his public house as an adjunct of his farm, and more for sociability
than gain. He was in a depressed and angry mood, for one of his eyes
was closed, and the other battered about the rim and beginning to
turn black and blue.

He knew McHenry, for both had been in these seas half their lives.

"In all my sixty years," he said, "I have not been assaulted quite
so viciously. I asked him for what he owed me, and the next I knew he
was shutting out the light with his fists. I will go to the gendarme
for a contravention against that villain. And right now I will fix
him in my book."

"Why, who hit you, and what did you do?" asked McHenry.

"That damned Londoner, Hobson," said McTavish. "He was my guest here
several years ago, and ate and drank well for a month or two when he
hadn't a sou