the choicest day of all the week, because Sunday is a day of
feasting, and the marche then has a more than gala air. The English
missionaries had once made even cooking a fish on Sunday a crime,
severely punished; but the French priests changed all that, and the
French Sabbath, the New York Sabbath, was en regle.

All the east is purple and red, gorgeous, flaring, when I awake. There
are no windows in my connecting rooms in the Annexe. The sun rises
through their wallless front, and sets through their opening to the
balcony. What more liberal dispensation of nature? I am under the
shower in two minutes, long enough to go down the curved staircase,
with its admirable rosewood balustrade, and through the rear veranda to
the room in which the large cement basin serves for bath and laundry
and to lend a minute to the Christchurch Kid, the prize-fighter, to
inform me that he is to open a school of the manly art, with diplomas
for finished scholars and rewards for excellence. The recitals are
to be public, a fee charged, and all ambitious pupils are to be
guaranteed open examination in pairs and a just decision. The Kid
and Cowan are to be hors de combat.

A daughter of a French governor of the Low Archipelago is in the basin,
the door ajar, and the spray blinding her to my presence. She is
seventeen, cafe au lait--beaucoup de lait, kohl-eyed, meter-tressed,
and slim-bodied. She sings the himene of the battle of the limes and
coal and potatoes, with a new stanza concerning the return of the
Noa-Noa, and the vengeance of the Tahitian braves upon the pigs of
Peretania, Britain.

"Ia or a na! Bonjour, Goo' night!" she says impartially, and modestly
slips her pareu about her.

"Ia ora na oe!" I reply. "All goes well?"

"By cripe' yais; dam' goo'!" she answers, and goes humming on her
way to her shanty in the yard. She is the maid of my chamber, gentle,
willing, but never to be found for service. She learns English from
the Kid, the rubber-legged boot-black, and other gentleman adventurers
and tars of America and Europe, and she pours out bad words--I cannot
mention them--in innocent faith in their propriety. In French or
Tahitian she speaks correctly.

Outside the bath I hear the vehicles hurrying to market, and dressing
quickly in white drill, and wearing on my Paumotu hat a brilliant
scarlet pugaree, once the badge of subjugation to the Mohammedan
conquerors of India, I join the procession.

Bon dieu! what a morning!