Tahitians
decades ago were of coral stones, and are now black with age and
weather.

I headed my canoe toward the barrier reef, and tied it to a knob
of coral. Then I stepped out upon the reef itself, my tennis shoes
keeping the sharp edges from cutting my feet. It was the low tide
succeeding sunrise, and the water over the reef was a few inches
deep, so that I could see the marine life of the wall, the many kinds
of starfish, the sea-urchins, and the curious bivalves which hide
with their shell-tips just even with the floor of the lagoon, and,
keeping them barely even, wait for foolish prey.

The floor of the lagoon was most interesting; the prodigality of nature
in the countless number of low forms of life, their great variety,
their beauty, and their ugliness, and, appealing to me especially,
the humor of nature in the tricks she played with color and shape,
her score of clowns of the sea equaling her funny fellows ashore,
the macaws, the mandrills, the dachshunds, and the burros.

The sunlight on the water at that hour was like silver spangles on a
sapphire robe. I paddled near to the Marara, and watched her let go
her anchor and send her boat ashore with a stern line. Fastened to
a cannon and passed around a bitt on the schooner, the crew hauled
her close to the embankment, and soon she was broadside to, and her
gangway on the quay. Her captain, M. Moet, Woronick, a pearl merchant,
a government physician, and the passengers from the Paumotus were soon
ashore shaking hands with friends. I walked behind them to Lovaina's
for coffee, and was introduced to them all.

Woronick took me to his house across the street from the Tiare
Hotel, and there opened a massive safe and showed me drawer after
drawer of pearls. They were of all sizes and shapes and tints, from
a pear-shaped, brilliant, Orient pearl of great value, to the golden
pipi of inconsiderable worth. Woronick spoke of a pearl he had bought
some years ago in Takaroa, the creation of which, he said, had cost
the lives of three men including a great savant.

"If you go to Takaroa," said Woronick, "be sure to see old Tepeva
a Tepeva. He used to be one of the best divers in the Low Islands,
but he's got the bends. He sold me the greatest pearl ever found in
these fisheries in the last twenty years, and I made enough profit
on it to buy a house in Paris and live a year. Get him to tell you
his yarn. It beats Monte Cristo all hollow."

Which I made a note to d