ropical fruits. Often the pave is a spatter of the fallen mangos,
its slippery condition of no import to the barefooted Tahitian,
but to the shod a cause of sudden, strange gyrations and gestures,
and of irreverence toward the Deity.

Scores of varieties of fruits and flowers, shade-trees, and ornamental
plants were brought to Tahiti by ship commanders, missionaries,
officials, and traders, in the last hundred years, while many of
the indigenous growths have been transplanted to other islands and
continents by those whose interests were in them. The Mutiny of
the Bounty, perhaps the most romantic incident of these South Seas,
was the result of an effort to transport breadfruit-tree shoots from
Tahiti to the West Indies. It is a beautiful trait in humankind, which,
maybe, designing nature has endowed us with to spread her manifold
creations, that even the most selfish of men delight in planting in
new environments exotic seeds and plants, and in enriching the fauna of
faraway islands with strange animals and insects. The pepper- and the
gum-tree that make southern California's desert a bower, the oranges
and lemons there which send a million golden trophies to less-favored
peoples, are the flora of distant climes. Since the days of the white
discoverers, adventurers and priests, fighting men and puritans,
have added to the earth's treasury in Tahiti and all these islands.

Walking one morning along the waterfront, I met two very dark
negresses. They had on pink and black dresses, with red cotton
shawls, and they wore flaming yellow handkerchiefs about their woolly
heads. They were as African as the Congo, and as strange in this
setting as Eskimos on Broadway. They felt their importance, for they
were of the few good cooks of French dishes here. They spoke a French
patois, and guffawed loudly when one dropped her basket of supplies
from her head. They were servants of the procureur de la Republique,
who had brought them from the French colony of Martinique.

Many races have mingled here. One saw their pigments and their lines
in the castes; here a soupcon of the French and there a touch of the
Dane; the Chileno, himself a mestizo, had left his print in delicacy
of feature, and the Irish his freckles and pug, which with tawny
skin, pearly teeth, and the superb form of the pure Tahitian, left
little to be desired in fetching and saucy allurement. Thousands of
sailors and merchants and preachers had sowed their seed here,