also most indigestible.

"Begin their eating by sucking a cold one," once said a bon vivant
to me. "Only when accustomed to them should you dare them hot and
in numbers."

Flying-fish are sold, many of them delicate in taste and shapely.

One may buy favorite sauces for fish, and some of the women offered
them to me. One is taiaro, made of the hard meat of the cocoanut,
with pounded shrimp, and allowed to ferment slightly. It is put up in
bamboo tubes, three inches in diameter, and four or five feet long,
tied at the opening with a pandanus-leaf for a seal. It is delicious
on raw fish. I have seen a native take his fish by the tail and
devour it as one would a banana; but the Tahitians cut up the fish,
and, after soaking it in lime-juice, eat it with the taiaro. It is
as tasty as Blue Points and tabasco.

There are two other epicurean sauces, one made of the omotu, the
soft cocoanut, which is split, the meat dug out and put in the hue,
the calabash, mixed with a little salt water, lime-juice, and the
juice of the rea, the saffron, and allowed to ferment. This is the
mitihue, a piquant and fetid, puante sauce that seasons all Tahitian
meals. The calabash is left in the sun, and when the sauce dries up,
water is poured on the dry ingredients, a perpetual saucebox.

In the arrangement of vegetables our own hucksters could learn. Every
piece is scraped and cleansed. String beans are tied together in
bundles like cigars or asparagus, and lettuce of several varieties,
romaine and endive, parsnips, carrots, beets, turnips, and even
potatoes, sweet and white, are shown in immaculate condition. The
tomatoes do not rival ours, but Tahiti being seventeen degrees below
the equator, one cannot expect such tropical regions to produce
temperate-zone plants to perfection. That they are provided at all is
due to the Chinese, those patient, acute Cantonese and Amoyans. The
Tahitian has no competence in intensive cultivation or the will to
toil. Were it not for the Chinese, white residents in many countries
would have to forego vegetables. It is so in Mexico and Hawaii and
the Philippines, although Japanese in the first two compete with them.

The main food of the Tahitians is feis, as is bread to us, or rice to
the Asiatic. It is not so in the Marquesas, eight hundred miles north,
where breadfruit is the staff, nor in Hawaii, where fermented taro
(poi) is the chief reliance of the kanaka. The feis, gigantic bananas
of coarse fiber