wall.

Half a dozen Tahitian youths were lolling outside in the shade, and
one, at the request of the host, led up the horse and the boy who
guarded it. The child skirted the circumference of the monkey's swing,
and then, a few feet away, squatted to regard the animal with intense
surprise and interest.

"Uritaata," he said; "I never saw one before, but I have read in my
school-book that they have those dogmen in French colonies."

Uri means dog and taata man, and the compound name was that which
sprang to the lips of the Tahitians on seeing a monkey, just as they
called the horse puaa horo fenua, the pig that runs on the earth, and
the goat, horo niho, the pig with horns. The pig and the dog were the
only land mammals they knew before the white arrived. The race-track
near Papeete was puaa horo fenua faa titi auraa. If a pig could talk,
he would say that man was a wickeder and stronger pig. Jehovah has
whiskers like a Rabbi. The Rabbis made him like themselves. Man has
no other ideal.

The Tahitian youth addressed the Greek god as T'yonni, which was
an effort to say John, and I adopted it instanter, as he did my
own Maru. T'yonni said that Uritaata was the bane of his existence
at Tautira. After building his fare he had been called to America,
and had danced in Chinatown the night before his steamship departed
for his return to Papeete. He remembered obscurely drinking grappo
with a deep-sea sailor, and had awakened in his berth, the vessel
already at sea, and Uritaata asleep at his feet. Many Tahitians, he
said, had never seen such a fabulous brute, and T'yonni had stirred
in them a mood of dissatisfaction by telling that their forefathers
had descended from similar beings.

"How about Atamu and Eva?" they had asked the pastors.

Those conservatists had replied emphatically that Adam and Eve, the
first man and woman, were created by God, which agreed thoroughly with
the Tahitian legends, and after that T'yonni's generosity was ranked
higher than his knowledge. He laughed over the stories as we sat at
breakfast with my coachman in the kitchen. T'yonni said that the deacon
of the Protestant church expressed a belief that the Paumotuans or
even the French might have followed the Darwinian course of descent,
but that Tahitians could not swallow a doctrine that linked them in
relationship with Uritaata. The Tongans, Polynesians like themselves,
had a tradition that God made the Tongan first, then the pig, and
lastl