ard for minstrels
who sing such droll songs.

In Punaauia, the next district to Fa'a, was a schoolhouse and on it
a sign: 2 x 2 = 4.

M. Souvy, a government printer of Tahiti, had given the site out of his
humble savings. By the sign, in his blunt way, he struck at education
which does not teach the simple necessity of progress--common sense.

"Cela saute aux yeux," he had said.

He was long dead, but his symbol provoked a question from every
new-comer, and kept alive his name and philosophy. I never saw it but
I thought of an article I had once written that led to the overturning
of the educational system of a country. How all guide-posts point to
oneself! Near the school-house, a dozen yards from the salt water,
was a native house with a straw roof, a mere old shell, untenanted.

M. Edmond Brault, the government employee and musical composer,
a passenger on the diligence, had with him his violin, intending to
spend the day in company with it in a grove. He remarked the tumbledown
condition of the house, and said:

"I have sat under that toil de chaume, that straw roof, and talked
with and played for a painter who was living there quite apart from
the world. He was Monsieur Paul Gauguin, and he had a very distingue
establishment. The walls of his atelier were covered with his canvases,
and in front of the house he had a number of sculptures in wood. That
was about 1895, I think. I can see the maitre now. He wore a pareu
of red muslin and an undershirt of netting. He said that he adored
this corner of the world and would never leave it. He had returned
from Paris more than ever convinced that he was not fitted to live
in Europe. Yet, mon ami, he ran away from here, and went to the
savage Marquesas Islands, where he died in a few years. He loved the
third etude of Chopin, and the andante of Beethoven's twenty-third
sonata. You know music says things we would be almost afraid to put
in words, if we could. If Flaubert might have written 'Madame Bovary'
or 'Salambo' in musical notes, he would not have been prosecuted by
the censor. We musicians have that advantage."

"In America," I replied, "we have never yet censored musical
compositions, and many works are played freely because the censors
and the reform societies' detectives cannot understand them. But if
our inquisitors take up music, they may yet reach them. For instance,
the prelude of 'Tristan and Isolde,' and Strauss' 'Salome.'"

"No," returned the French