rded us with indifference. He was cast
for an old and withered Mephistopheles, his lines all downward, his
few teeth fangs, and his smile a threatening leer, as if he thought
of a joke he could not tell to decent visitors, but which almost
choked him to withhold. His clothes were rags, and his naked feet
like the flippers of seals. He opened his mouth, yawned, and said,
"Iiii," a word which means, "I slept with my eyes open."

He settled back upon the table, and became immersed again in
reverie. On the floor by the kitchen was a Tahitian woman with a
baby and a pandanus-basket of varos. They squirmed and wriggled,
contorted and crackled like giant thousand-legs, and almost excited
in me a repulsion.

The vahine laughed at me.

"I fished for them with a dozen grapnels," she said. "It was good
fishing to-day. I put a piece of fish on each group of hooks. You know
those holes are very small at the top and under two or three feet of
water. Not many know how to find them. I set a grapnel in each hole,
and then returned to the first to pull out the varo. I have more than
twenty here."

Butscher rose, and sluggishly began to prepare the breakfast. He
wrapped the varos in hotu-leaves, and put them in the umu to steam on
the red-hot stones, and began to open oysters and fry fish in brown
butter, as Tatini and I hastened to the beach for a bath. The sea
was studded with coral growth, and sponges by the thousand, and we
sat on these soft cushions under the surface, and watched the little
fishes' antics, and chatted. Tatini had gathered half a dozen nono,
a fruit that has a smooth skin and no stone, and she threw them at me.

"Do you know about the nono?" she asked merrily. "It was in our
courtship. When a crowd of young men were gathered to bathe in the
pools or to lie on the banks under the shade of the trees, suddenly a
missile struck one of them on the shoulder. The others began to shout
at him and to sing, for it was a sign that a vahine had chosen him. He
jumped to his feet and ran in the direction of the hidden thrower, and
she ran, too, but no farther than away from the eyes of the others."

"Tatini," I said, "the nono was the Tahitian arrow of a little fat
god we have called Cupid."

"Aue!" she replied. "It was not always oaoa for him, because it might
be an old woman, or some one he did not like, but who loved him. The
Arii, the aristocratic ladies, no matter how old, threw nono at the
youngest and handsomest you