unding was a wooden house, built partly over the water,
so that a seaward veranda extended into the lagoon, high on posts, and
commanded a view of the sea and the mountain. I saw on this veranda a
more arresting figure of a white man than I had before come upon in
Tahiti. His body, clothed only in a pareu, was very brown, but his
light beard and blue eyes proved his Nordic strain. He was of medium
size, powerful, with muscles rounded, but evident, under his satin
skin, and with large hands and feet. He was reading a book, and as
I ambled by, he raised his head and looked at me with a serious smile.

I checked the horse, and tied him to a candlenut-tree. I felt that
I had arrived at the end of my journey.

I spent the remainder of the day and the night there. The man and his
wife were as stars on a black night, as music to a blind bard. His name
was Nicolai Lermontoff, born in Moscow, and his wife was an American,
Alaska her place of birth, and of residence most of her life. They
were each about forty years old, and of extraordinary ease of manner
and felicity of expression.

"Muy simpatica," had said the old Gipsy at the Generalife in Granada
when I had spoken bolee with him. Lermontoff shook hands with me. His
was as hard as leather, calloused as a sailor's or a miner's, and so
contradicted his balanced head, intellectual face, and general air
of knowledge and world experience that I said:

"You have the horniest palm in Tahiti."

"I am a planter," he replied. "We have been here a few years, and after
buying the ground I had to clear it, because it had been permitted
to go to bush. There were a few hundred cocoanut-trees, but nothing
else worth while. I began at the highest point and worked to the sea."

I drew from him that he had bought eighteen acres of land for twelve
hundred dollars, and had spent most of a year in preparing it for
vanilla, cocoanuts, a few breadfruit, a small area of coffee and taro,
and a vegetable patch.

"We have very little money," he explained, "and live largely on catches
in the sea and stream, and fruit and vegetables, with a dozen chickens
for eggs. I pull at the net with the village. Actually, we figure
that fifteen dollars a month covers our expenditures. This house cost
five hundred and eight dollars, but, of course, I did a lot of work
on it. The chief items for us are books, reviews, and postage."

Three walls of the house were covered with books, and the fourth
stopped at t