hued _sea sea_
berries strung together, hanging from her neck and resting upon her
dainty bosom.

*****

Standing at the doorway of his house, looking over the placid waters
at the rising sun, Kennedy folds his brawny arms across his bare,
sun-tanned chest and mutters to himself, in his almost forgotten
mother-tongue: "Twenty years, twenty years ago! Who would know me there
now? Even if I placarded my name on my back and what I did, 'taint
likely I'd have to face a grand jury for running a knife into a mongrel
Portuguee, way out in the South Seas a score of years ago.... Poor
little Talamalu! I paid a big price for her--twenty years of wandering
from Wallis Island to the Bonins; and wherever I go that infernal story
follows me up. Well, I'll risk it anyhow, and the first chance that
comes along I'll cut Kanaka life and drinking ship's rum and go see
old dad and mum to home. Here, Tikena, you Tokelau devil, bring me my
toddy."

A native, clad in his grass _titi_, takes from a wooden peg in the house
wall two shells of toddy, and the white wanderer takes one and drinks.
He is about to return the other to the man when two girls come up from
the beach with their arms around each other's waists, Tahiti fashion,
and one calls out with a laugh to "leave some in the shell." This is
Laumanu, and if there is one thing in the world that Jake Kennedy cares
for above himself it is this tall girl with the soft eyes and lithe
figure. And he dreams of her pretty often, and curses fluently to think
that she is beyond his reach and is never likely to fill the place of
Talamalu and her many successors. For Laumanu is _tabu_ to a Nuitao
chief--that is, she has been betrothed, but the Nuitao man is sixty
miles away at his own island, and no one knows when he will claim his
_avaga_. Then the girl gives him back the empty toddy-shell, and, slyly
pinching his hand, sails away with her mate, whereupon the susceptible
Kennedy, furious with long disappointment, flings himself down on his
bed of mats, curses his luck and his unsuspecting rival at Nuitao, and
finally decides not to spring a surprise on "dad and mum" by going "hum"
for a considerable number of years to come.

*****

Mr. Jake Kennedy at this time was again a widower--in the widest sense
of the word. The last native girl who had occupied the proud position of
_Te avaga te papalagi_ (the white man's wife) was a native of the
island of Maraki--a dark-skinned, passionately jealous