with the postings of the chefferie.

A glance at the map of Tahiti shows it shaped like a Samoan fan, or,
roughly, like a lady's hand mirror. It is really two islands, joined
by the mile-wide isthmus of Taravao. The larger island is Poroiunu
or Tahiti-nui (big Tahiti), and the smaller Taiarapu, or Tahiti-iti
(little Tahiti). Tahiti-nui is almost round; and Tahitiiti, oval. Both
are volcanic, distinct in formation. They are united by a sedimentary
piece of land long after they were raised from the ocean's bed.

Mataiea is twenty-seven miles from Papeete, and well on toward the
isthmus.

Most of our passengers were Chinese, and I realized the Asiaticizing
of Tahiti. They were store-keepers, small farmers, or laborers. The
Broom Road lay most of the way along the beach, back of the fringe of
cocoanut and pandanus-trees, and between the homes and plantations
of Tahitians and foreigners. I saw all the fruits of the islands in
matchless profusion, intermingled with magnificent ferns, the dazzling
bougainvillea, the brilliant flamboyant-tree, and a thousand creepers
and plants. Every few minutes the road rushed to the water's-edge,
and the glowing main, with its flashing reef, and the shadowy outlines
of Moorea, a score of miles away, appeared and fled. Past villages,
churches, schools, and villas, the shops of the Chinese merchants,
the sheds for drying copra, rows of vanilla-vines, beaches with
canoes drawn up and nets drying on sticks, men and women lolling
on mats upon the eternal green carpet of the earth, girls waving
hands to us, superb men, naked save for pareus, with torsos, brown,
satiny, and muscled like Greek gladiators, women bathing in streams,
their forms glistening, their breasts bare; and constant to the scene,
dominating it, the lofty, snakelike cocoanuts and their brothers of
less height and greater girth.

At Fa'a a postwoman appeared. Before opening the mail-box she tarried
to light a cigarette and to chat with the driver about the new picture
at the cinema in Papeete. She commented laughingly on the writers and
addressees of the letters, and flirted with a passenger. The former
himene-house, which had been the dance-hall of Kelly, the leader of
the fish-strike, was vacant, but I heard in imagination the strains of
his pagan accordion, and the himene which will never be forgotten by
the Tahitians, "Hallelujah! I'm a bum!" Kelly had gone over the water
to the jails of the United States, where life is h