rens of Asia after senility
had struck away all charm. The princess refused a third glass of wine
at the table, but smoked incessantly, and listened absent-mindedly
to the music and the songs. Her thoughts may have been of those mad
nights of orgy which Davey, the dentist, and Brault, the composer, had
described. Her cigarettes were of native tobacco wrapped in pandanus
leaf, as the South American wraps his in corn husk. They were short;
merely a few puffs.

Afa, the tane of the lovely Evoa of the Annexe, brought to the luncheon
Annabelle Lee, the buxom wife of Lovaina's negro chauffeur. She was
a quadroon, a belle of dark Kentucky, with more than a touch of the
tar-brush in her skin and hair, and her gaudy clothes and friendly
manner had won the Tahitians completely. She was receiving much
attention wherever she went in Tahiti, for she had the fashion and
language and manners of the whites, as they knew them, and yet was
plainly of the colored races. The chauffeur himself, a self-respecting
negro, had sat at table with Lovaina many times. There was in Tahiti no
color-line. In America a man with a drop of colored blood in his veins
is classed as a colored man; in Cuba a drop of white blood makes him
a white man. The whites honor their own pigment in all South America,
but in the United States count the negro blood as more important. In
Tahiti all were color-blind.

The amuraa maa was over in a few hours. There were no speeches, but
much laughter, and much singing of the himene written by the king,
"E maururu a vau!"

The tune was an old English hymn, but those were all the words of
the song, and they meant, "I am so happy!" They were verses worthy
of monarchy anywhere, and equaled the favorite of great political
gatherings in America, "We're here because we're here!"

"When I was made chief of Mataiea," said Tetuanui, reminiscently to
me as we sang, "I went, as was the custom, to Papeete to drink with
the king. He had just fallen down a stairway while drunk, and injured
himself severely, so that our official drinking was limited. He hated
stairs, anyhow, but his trouble was that he mixed his drinks. That is
suicidal. He would empty into a very large punch-bowl champagne, beer,
absinthe, claret, whisky and any other boissons, and drink the compound
from a goblet. He could hold gallons. He was dead in two weeks after
I had my chiefly toasts with him. His body was like an old calabash
in which you have kept liquor for