e
heights, appearing as ribbons of white on a clear day, and not
seldom disappearing in vapor as they fall sheer hundreds of feet,
or thousands, in successive drops. When heavy rains come, torrents
suddenly spring into being and dash madly down the precipitous cliffs
to swell the brooks and little rivers and rush headlong to the sea.

Tahiti has an unexcelled climate for the tropics, the temperature for
the year averaging seventy-seven degrees and varying from sixty-nine
to eighty-four degrees. June, July, and August are the coolest and
driest months, and December to March the rainiest and hottest. It is
often humid, enervating, but the south-east, the trade-wind, which
blows regularly on the east side of the islands, where are Papeete
and most of the settlements, purifies the atmosphere, and there are
no epidemics except when disease is brought directly from the cities
of America or Australasia. A delicious breeze comes up every morning
at nine o'clock and fans the dweller in this real Arcadia until past
four, when it languishes and ceases in preparation for the vesper
drama of the sun's retirement from the stage of earth.

Typhoons or cyclones are rare about Tahiti, but squalls are frequent
and tidal waves recurrent. The rain falls more than a hundred days
a year, but usually so lightly that one thinks of it as liquid
sunshine. In the wet quarter from December until March there are
almost daily deluges, when the air seems turned to water, the land
and sea are hidden by the screen of driving rain, and the thunder
shakes the flimsy houses, and echoes menacingly in the upper valleys.

Papeete, the seat of government and trade capital of all the French
possessions in these parts of the world, is a sprawling village
stretching lazily from the river of Fautaua on the east to the cemetery
on the west, and from the sea on the north to half a mile inland. It
is the gradual increment of garden and house upon an aboriginal
village, the slow response of a century to the demand of official and
trading white, of religious group and ambitious Tahitian, of sailor
and tourist. Here flow all the channels of business and finance,
of plotting and robbery, of pleasure and profit, of literature and
art and good living, in the eastern Pacific. Papeete is the London
and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, dispensing the styles
and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making
the laws and enforcing or compromising t