ix-months' infant. Her breasts were dark blue, almost black, a
characteristic of nursing mothers here.

Both the mother and Flower argued with me that I should make Many
Daughters my wife during my stay in Atuona, and if not the leper lass,
then another friend they had chosen for me. Flower herself had done
me the honor of proposing a temporary alliance, but I had persuaded
her that I was not worthy of her beauty and talents. Any plea that
it was not according to my code, of even that it was un-Christian,
provoked peals of laughter from all who heard it; sooth to say, the
whites laughed loudest.

Beneath a thatch of palm-leaves Lam Kai Oo was drying cocoanuts. His
withered yellow body straddled a kind of bench, to which was fixed a
sharp-pointed stick of iron-wood. Seizing each nut in his claw-like
hands, he pushed it against this point, turning and twisting it as
he ripped off the thick and fibrous husk. Then he cracked each nut
in half with a well-directed blow of a heavy knife. For the best
copra-making, the half-nuts should be placed in the sun, concave
side up. As the meats begin to dry, they shrink away from the shell
and are readily removed, being then copra, the foundation of the
many toilet preparations, soaps and creams, that are made from
cocoa-oil.

As it rains much in the Marquesas, the drying is often done in ovens,
though sun-dried copra commands a higher price. Lam Kai Oo was
operating such an oven, a simple affair of stones cemented with mud,
over which had been erected a shed of palm-trunks and thatch. The
halved cocoanuts were placed in cups made of mud and laid on wooden
racks above the oven. With the doors closed, a fire was built in the
stone furnace and fed from the outside with cocoa-husks and brush.
Such an oven does not dry the nuts uniformly. The smoke turns them
dark, and oil made from them contains undesirable creosote.
Hot-water pipes are the best source of heat, except the sun,
but Lam Kai Oo was paying again for his poverty, as the poor
man must do the world over.

Forty-four years earlier he had left California, after having given
seven years of his life to building American railways. The smoke of
the Civil War had hardly cleared away when Captain Hart had
persuaded him, Ah Yu and other California Chinese to come to Hiva-oa,
and put their labor into his cotton plantations. Cannibalism was
common at that date. I asked the old man if he had witnessed it.

"My see plenty fella eatee,