and rare. In turn,
not wishing to exaggerate the difference between our means, I gave
him a box of cigars I had brought from America. I visited him at Fa'a,
and found his coop had been a poultry shelter, and was humble, indeed;
but I had slept a hundred nights in many countries in worse. He had a
box for a table for eating and writing, and a rude cot. A few dishes
and implements, and a roost of books and reviews in Russian, English,
French, German, and other languages, completed his equipment.

He had several times reiterated his earnest wish to leave Tahiti, and
his longing rested heavily on my heart. Upon lying down at night I had
felt my own illiberality in not making it possible for him to realize
his desire. A hundred dollars would send him there, with enough left
over for a fortnight's keep. But my apology for not buying him a ticket
was the real fear of his unhappiness. What could a friendless man of
eighty do to exist in the United States other than become the inmate
of a poorhouse? The best he could hope for would be to be taken in by
the Little Sisters of the Poor, who house a few old men. They were,
doubtless, kind, but probably insistent on neatness and religiosity.

The cold, the brutal policemen and guards, the venial justice, the
crystallized charity in the name of a statistical Christ, arrested
my hand. I had known it all at first hand, asking no favor. I
believed that he would be worse off than in his chicken-coop. He
could wear anything or nearly nothing in Tahiti, and his old Prince
Albert comforted him; but he would have to conform to dress rules
in a stricter civilization. Nature was a loving mother here and a
shrewish hag there, at least toward the poor. And yet I was uneasy
at my own argument.

For a month or two he had led the talk between us and any others in
the parc to new discoveries in medicine. From his Fa'a seclusion he
followed these very closely through European publications, for which
his slender funds went. He had a curiously opposed nature, quoting
with enthusiasm the idealistic philosophers, and descending into such
abject materialism as haunting the bishop's palace for the cigar-stubs.

He would say that the purest joy in life is that which lifts us out
of our daily existence and transforms us into disinterested spectators
of it.

"This divine release from the common ways of men can be found only
through art," Stroganoff would apostrophize. "The final and only
true solution of