s was fashionable, and at the instigation of
the English missionaries destroyed many beautiful and ancient trees,
statues, carvings, and buildings. The Tahitians who mourned his
iconoclasm had a chant which said that the Taharuu River ran blood
when their gods were dishonored."

From the stream the vast domain of the plantation of Atimaono stretched
to Mataiea. It had been planted in the sixties, when British demands
for cotton, and the blockade and laying waste of the South in the
American Civil War caused a thousand such speculations all over
the world.

It was for this plantation, the most celebrated in Tahiti, that
Chinese were imported, and a thousand had their shanties where now
is brush. Those were the times that the Marquesas had their cotton
boom, and lapsed, too. Upon a hill of this plantation the English
manager, a former cavalry officer, had built himself a palatial
mansion, and lived like a feudal lord, the most powerful resident
of Tahiti. Travelers from all the world were his guests. Fair ladies
danced the night away upon his broad verandas and drank the choicest
wines of France. Scandal wove a dozen strange stories of intrigues,
of a high official who sold his wife to him, of Arioian orgies, and all
the associations of semi-regal rule and accountability to none. Cotton
prices declined, the bubble burst in bankruptcy, the miserable death
of the aristocrat, and the fury of cheated English investors.

The plantation was now owned by a storekeeper of Tahiti, prosy and
disliked, who had fattened by ability to outwit the natives; but the
glory had departed, and the place languished, ruins and jungle, the
prey of guava and lantana. The neighborhood was known as Ati-Maono,
"The Clan of Maon."

The lines between village and country were not rigid, and often
the hamlet straggled along the road for much of the district. Every
kilometer there was a stone marking the distance from Papeete. One
knew the villages more by the Chinese stores than by any other feature.

"You will find the Papara country full of oranges," Fragrance of the
Jasmine had said.

The fruit was as sweet and delicious as any I had eaten, and the trees
larger than their parents of Sydney, Australia. I strolled along the
road eating, speaking all who passed or were in sight within their
gardens, and came to Mataiea, where I was to live months and to learn
the Tahitian mind and language.

Ariioehau Amerocarao, commonly known as Tetuanui Tava