five inches long, in half an hour.

The water, about fifteen feet deep near the made embankment, was
alive with the tiny fish, squirming in a mass as they were pursued
by larger fish. The son of Prince Hinoe, a round-shouldered lout,
very tall, awkward, and merry, held a bamboo pole. His white suit was
soiled and ragged, and he whistled "All Coons Look alike to Me!" The
peanut-vender had brought a rod, and was fishing with difficulty
and mostly by feel. He could keep one eye open only, as one hand was
occupied, but he pulled in many ature.

The parc was the occasional assembling-place for the drifting whites
made thoughtful by trolling the jolly, brown bowl, and by those to
whom lack of francs denied the trolling. It was there I first met
Ivan Stroganoff, the aged Russian philosopher, and it was from there
I took Wilfrid Baillon to the hospital. Baillon was a very handsome
cow-boy from British Columbia, and was housed in Papeete with a
giant Scandinavian who owned a cattle ranch in South America. He
was generally called the Great Dane, and was the person meant in the
charge for three cocktails at Lovaina's: "Germani to Fany, 3 feathers."

The cow-boy became ill. I prescribed castor-oil, and Mme. Fanny,
half a tumbler of Martinique rum, with the juice of a lime in it. She
was famous for this remedy for all internal troubles, and I took one
with the cowboy as a prophylactic, as I might have been exposed to
the same germs. He did not improve, though he followed Fanny's regimen
exactly. He was sitting dejectedly in the parc, looking pale and thin,
when I broached the subject.

"As the Fanny physic fails to straighten you out," I said to him,
"why not try the hospital?"

He recoiled.

"Have you ever lamped it?" he asked. "It looks like a calaboose."

"It ain't so bad," said Kelly, the I.W.W., who was proselyting as
usual among the flotsam and jetsam of the waterfront. "I 've been in
worse joints in the United States."

The cow-boy yielding, I escorted him to the institution, carrying
his bag, as what with his disease and his antidote he was weak. The
hospital was a block away from the lagoon. It was surrounded by a
high stone wall, and as it was built by the military, it was ugly and
had the ridiculous effrontery of the army and all its lack of common
sense. The iron gate was shut, and a sign said, "Sonnez s'il vous
plait!" A toothless French portiere of thirty years let us in. All the
doctors of Tahiti had left