diancy like a dream figure of ivory. We dived into
schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet
below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours
floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the
sun. We laughed at his native name, Pupure, which means fair, and at
the titles given Tahiti by visitors: the New Cytherea by Bougainville,
a russet Ireland by McBirney, my fellow voyager on the Noa-Noa and
Aph-Rhodesia by a South-African who had fought the Boers and loved
the Tahitian girls and who now idled with us. Brooke, as we paddled
over the dimpled lagoon, quoted the Greek for an apt description, the
innumerable laughter of the waves. Brooke had been in Samoa, and was
about to leave for England after several months in Tahiti. He wrote
home that he had found the most ideal place in the world to work and
live in. On the wide veranda he composed three poems of merit, "The
Great Lover," "Tiare Tahiti," and "Retrospect." He could understand
the Polynesian, and he loved the race, and hated the necessity of
a near departure. Their communism in work he praised daily, their
singing at their tasks, and their wearing of flowers. We had in common
admiration of those qualities and a fervor for the sun. For his Greek
I gave him St. Francis's canticle, which begins:

Laudate sie, mi signore, cum tuote le tue creature,
Spetialmente messer lo frate sole.

Praised be my Lord, with all his creatures, and especially our brother
the Sun, our sister the Moon, our brother the Wind, our sister Water,
who is very serviceable unto us and humble and chaste and clean; our
brother Fire, our mother Earth, and last of all for our sister Death.

We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians
never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their
nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede
to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education
when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about
without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men
retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they
wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to
propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits in scales. Man
originated on the seashore, and many of the most primitive habits of
humans, as well as their bodily differences from the apes,