earth sparkled and glittered, and on the schooners by the
Cercle Bougainville himenes of joy rang out on the soft air.

I passed them close, so close that a girl of Huahine who was dancing
on the deck of the Mihimana seized me by the arm and embraced me.

"Come back, stranger!" she cried in Tahitian. "There is pleasure here,
and the night is but just begun."

A dozen island schooners swayed in the gentle breeze, their stays
humming softly, their broadsides separated from the quays by just
a dozen or twenty feet, as if they feared to risk the seduction of
the land, and felt themselves safer parted from the shore. On all the
street-level verandas, the entrances to the shops and the restaurants,
the hundreds of natives who had not wanted other lodging slept as
children in cradles until they should rise for coffee before the
market-bell.

From the Chinese shop at the corner the strains of a Canton actor's
falsetto, with the squeak of the Celestial fiddles issued from a
phonograph, but so real I fancied I was again on Shameen, listening
over the Canton River to the noises of the night, the music, and the
singsong girls of the silver combs.

I went on, and met the peanut-man. He sold me two small bags of roasted
goobers for eight sous. He wore the brown, oilskin-like, two-piece
suit of the Chinese of southern China, and he had no teeth and no
hair, and his eyes would not stay open. He had to open them with his
fingers, so that most of the time he was blind; but he counted money
accurately, and he had a tidy bag of silver and coppers strapped to
his stomach. He looked a hundred years old.

When I paid for the two bags, he raised his lids, believed that I
was a speaker of English, and said, "Fine businee!"

As I went past the queen's palace, the two mahus were chanting low,
as they sat on the curbing, and they glanced coquettishly at me,
but asked only for cigarettes. I gave them a package of Marinas,
made in the Faubourg Bab-el-oued, in Algiers, and they said "Maruru"
and "Merci" in turn and in unison. Strange men these, one bearded and
handsome, the other slender and in his twenties, their dual natures
contrasting in their broad shoulders and their swaying hips, their
men's pareus and shirts, and bits of lace lingerie. I met them half
a dozen times a day, and as I was now known as a resident, not the
idler of a month, they bowed in hope of recognition.

In the Annexe all was quiet, but in the great sailing canoe of