es and embower the homes in green and flower. If one leaves the
few principal streets or roads in Papeete, one walks only on well-worn
trails through the thick growth of lantana, guavas, pandanus, wild
coffee, and a dozen other trees and bushes. The paths are lined with
hedges of false coffee, where thrifty people live, and again there
are open spaces with vistas of little houses in groves, rows of tiny
cabins close together. Everywhere are picturesque disorder, dirt,
rubbish, and the accrued wallow of years of laissez-aller; but the
mighty trade-winds and the constant rains sweep away all bad odors,
and there is no resultant disease.

"My word," said Stevens, a London stockbroker, here to rehabilitate
a broken corporation, "if we English had this place, wouldn't there
be a cleaning up! We'd build it solid and sanitary, and have proper
rules to make the bally natives stand around."

The practical British would that. They have done so in a dozen of
their far-flung colonies I hare been in, from Singapore to Barbadoes,
though they have failed utterly in Jamaica. Yet, I am at first sight,
of the mind that only the Spanish would have kept, after decades of
administration, as much of the simple beauty of Papeete as have the
Gauls. True, the streets are a litter, the Government almost unseen
as to modern uplift, the natives are indolent and life moves without
bustle or goal. The republic is content to keep the peace, to sell
its wares, to teach its tongue, and to let the gentle Tahitian hold
to his island ways, now that his race dies rapidly in the spiritual
atmosphere so murderous to natural, non-immunized souls and bodies.

Many streets and roads are shaded by spreading mango-trees, a fruit
brought in the sixties from Brazil, and perfected in size and flavor
here by the patient efforts of French gardeners and priests. The trees
along the town ways are splendid, umbrageous masses of dark foliage
whose golden crops fall upon the roadways, and which have been so
chosen that though they are seasonal, the round mango is succeeded
by the golden egg, and that by a small purple sort, while the large,
long variety continues most of the year. Monseigneur Jaussen, the
Catholic bishop who wrote the accepted grammar and dictionary of the
Tahitian language, evolved a delicious, large mango, with a long,
thin stone very different from the usual seed, which occupies most
of the circumference of this slightly acidulous, most luscious of
t