have poured down the rich detritus
and humus to cover the coral beaches and afford sustenance for man
and beast. About the island countless trillions of tiny animals have
reared the shimmering reef which bears the brunt of the breaking
seas, and spares their impact upon the precious land. These minute
beings in the unfathomable scheme of the Will had worked and perished
for unguessed ages to leave behind this monument of their existence,
their charnel-house. Man had often told himself that a god had inspired
them thus to build havens for his vessels and abodes of marine life
where man might kill lesser beings for his food and sport.

Always, in the approach to the island in steamship, schooner, or
canoe, one is amazed and transported by the varying aspect of it. A
few miles away one would never know that man had touched it. His
inappreciable structures are erased by the flood of green color, which,
from the edge of the lagoon to the spires of La Diademe, nearly eight
thousand feet above the water, makes all other hues insignificant. In
all its hundred miles or so of circumference nature is the dominant
note--a nature so mysterious, so powerful, and yet so soft-handed,
so beauty-loving and so laughing in its indulgences, that one can
hardly believe it the same that rules the Northern climes and forces
man to labor in pain all his days or to die.

The scene from a little distance is as primeval as when the first
humans climbed in their frail canoes through the unknown and terrible
stretches of ocean, and saw Tahiti shining in the sunlight. A mile
or two from the lagoon the fertile land extends as a slowly-ascending
gamut of greens as luxuriant as a jungle, and forming a most pleasing
foreground to the startling amphitheater of the mountains, darker,
and, in storm, black and forbidding.

Those mountains are the most wonderful examples of volcanic rock on
the globe. Formed of rough and crystalline products of the basic fire
of earth, they hold high up in their recesses coral beds once under
the sea, and lava in many shapes, tokens of the island's rise from
the slime, and of mammoth craters now almost entirely obliterated by
denudation--the denudation which made the level land as fertile as
any on earth, and the suitable habitation of the most leisurely and
magnificent human animals of history.

A thousand rills that drink from the clouds ever encircling the
crags, and in which they are often lost from view, leap from th