lity and unselfishness.

Never before had I appreciated so well the divine character of
Jesus or conjectured so clearly the scenes of his teaching upon the
shores of the Lake of Galilee. Excepting the tropical plants and the
eternal accent of the reef, the old Tahitian and I might have been in
Palestine with Peter and the sons of Zebedee and the disciples. They
were people of slender worldly knowledge, the carpenter's son knew
nothing of history, and ate with his fingers, as did Ori-a-Ori; but
their open eyes, unclouded by sophistication and complex interests,
looked at the universe and saw God. They lived mostly under the open
sky in touch with nature, dependent on its manifestations immediately
about them for their sustenance, and with its gifts and curses for
their concerns and symbols.

Occidentals, who seldom muse, to whom contemplation is waste of time,
do not enjoy the oneness with nature shared by these Polynesians
with the sacred Commoner whose beatitudes were to bring anarchy upon
the Roman world, and destroy the effects of the philosophies of the
ablest minds of Greece. The fishermen of Samaria were gay and somber
by turn, as were the Tahitians, doing little work, but much thinking,
and innocent and ignorant of the perplexing problems and offensive
indecencies of striving and luxury. The air and light nurtured them,
and they confidently leaned upon the hand of God to guide and preserve.

Thoreau's "Cry of the Human" echoed in the dark as the chief and I
chanted the idealistic desires of the friend of man:

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest
life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted
from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature. He has
glances of starry recognition to which our salons are strangers. The
steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like
the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling
and shortlived blaze of candles.

One evening when we had walked down to the beach to gaze at the
heavens and to speculate on the inhabitants of the planets, we sat
on our haunches, our feet lapped by the warm tide, and for the first
time I drew our conversation to a man who in a brief friendship had
won the deep affection of this noble islander.

"Ori-a-Ori," I began, "in America, in the city where I lived, my
house was ne