rried rank beyond her on
the mats that filled the hollow between the palm-trunks. All slept
with the backs of their heads upon one timber, and the backs of
their knees over the other, but I found comfort on the soft pile
between them. My companions slumbered peacefully, as I have remarked
that men do in all countries where the people live near, and much in,
the sea. There was no snoring or groaning, no convulsive movement of
arms or legs, no grimaces or frowns such as mark the fitful sleep of
most city dwellers and of all of us who worry or burn the candle at
both ends.

I lay listening for some time to their quiet breathing and the sound
of rain drumming on the thatch, but at last my eyes closed, and only
the dawn awoke me.

[Illustration: Splitting cocoanut husks in copra making process]

[Illustration: Cutting the meat from cocoanuts to make copra]

CHAPTER XIII

The household of Lam Kai Oo; copra making; marvels of the
cocoanut-groves; the sagacity of pigs; and a crab that knows the
laws of gravitation.

Next morning, after bidding farewell to my hosts, I set out down the
mountain in the early freshness of a sunny, rain-washed morning. I
followed a trail new to me, a path steep as a stairway, walled in by
the water-jeweled jungle pressing so close upon me that at times I
saw the sky only through the interlacing fronds of the tree-ferns
above my head.

I had gone perhaps a mile without seeing any sign of human habitation,
hearing only the conversation of the birds and the multitudinous
murmuring of leaves, when a heavy shower began to fall. Pressing on,
hampered by my clinging garments and slipping in the path that had
instantly become a miniature torrent, I came upon a little clearing
in which stood a dirty, dark shanty, like a hovel in the outskirts
of Canton, not raised on a _paepae_ but squat in an acre of mud and
the filth of years.

Two children, three or four years old, played naked in the muck, and
Flower, of the red-gold hair, reputed the wickedest woman in the
Marquesas, ironed her gowns on the floor of the porch. Raising her
head, she called to me to come in.

This was the house of Lam Kai Oo, the adopted father of Flower.
Seventy-one years old, Lam Kai Oo had made this his home since he
left the employ of Captain Hart, the unfortunate American cotton
planter, and here he had buried three native wives. His fourth, a
woman of twenty years, sat in the shelter of a copra shed nursing a
s