but his quarter aboriginal blood caused
the least aspersion on them by others to touch him on the raw.

"Well, there's a bloody lot o'them," broke in Lying Bill.

"Eighty only," stated Llewellyn, conclusively. "The Government has
taken a census, and they 're all to be brought here. Did you hear
that Tissot left for Raiatea when he heard of the census? He's a
leper and a white man. They seized young Briand yesterday."

I was astonished, because the latter had lived opposite the Tiare
Hotel, and I had met him often at the barber's. I had been "next"
to him at Marechal's shop a week before.

"He did not know he was a leper until they examined him," Llewellyn
went on. "He does not know how he contracted the disease. I don't
mind it. I am not afraid. You get used to it. I tell you, the only
leper I ever knew that made me cry was a kid. I used to see on the
porch of a house on the road to Papara from Papeete a big doll. A
little leper girl owned it, and she was ashamed to be seen outside
her home, so she put on the veranda the doll she loved best to greet
her friends. She made out that the doll was really herself, and she
loved to listen when those who might have been playmates talked to
the doll and fondled it. She lived for and in the doll, and those
who cherished the little girl saw that each Christmas the doll was
exchanged secretly for a bigger one, keeping pace with the growth of
the child. I have caressed it and sung to it, and guessed that the
child was peeping and listening inside. She herself never touched
it, for it would be like picking up one's own self. Each Christmas
she saw herself born again, for the old dolls were burned without
her knowledge. And all the time her own little body was falling to
pieces. Last Christmas she was carried to the door to see the new
doll. I bought it for her, and I had in it a speaking-box, to say
'Bonjour!' I sent to Paris for it. She's dead now, poor little devil,
or they'd have shut her up in the lazaretto."

Bemis bought cocoanuts for shipment for food purposes. His firm sold
them all over America to fruitdealers for eating raw by children,
and shredded and prepared them for confectioners and grocers. He was
the only buyer in Tahiti of fresh nuts, as all others purchased them
as copra, split and dried, for the oil. Bemis had been here years ago,
he said.

"I'm married now," he told me, "but in those days I was a damn
fool about the Tahitian girls. I put in six months her