e most remote
edges of the valley. Unwittingly, in my gratitude, I had raised it,
and now I pursued my way in the glare of a pitiless publicity.

I was met almost immediately by a score of men and women who had
left the gathering of fruit or the duties of the household to greet
me. Fafo, the leader, besought me earnestly to accompany them to a
neighboring _paepae_ and dance for them.

He had the finest eyes I have ever seen in a man's head, dark brown,
almond-shaped, large and lustrous, wells of melancholy. There was
something exquisite about the young man, his lemon-colored skin, his
delicate hands and feet, his slender, though strong, body, and his
regular, brilliant teeth. Some Spanish don had bred him, or some
moody Italian with music in his soul, for he was a Latin in face and
figure. His eyes had that wistfulness as they sought mine which the
Tahitians have put well in one of their picture-words, _ano-ano'uri_,
"the yearning, sorrowful gaze of a dog watching his master at dinner."

A belated shrinking from renown, however, made me reject his pleas,
and perceiving a pool near at hand, I softened refusal by a
suggestion that we bathe. The pool, I learned, was famous in the
valley, for one could swim forty feet in it, and on the other side
the hill rose straight, with banana-trees overhanging the water forty
feet above. We climbed this rocky face and dived into the water
again and again, rejoicing in its coolness and in that sheer pagan
delight of the dive, when in the air man becomes all animal, freed
from every restraint and denied every safeguard save the strength of
his own muscle and nerve.

We saw at last, on the edge of the bank, one of Grelet's dogs,
whining for attention. He was badly wounded in two places, blood
dripped on the rocks from open cuts three inches long, and one paw
hung helpless, while with eager cries and beseeching looks he urged
us to avenge him in his private feud with a boar. Assured of our
interest, he stayed not to be comforted or cured, but hobbled
eagerly up the trail, begging us with whines to accompany him.

Five men and several other dogs followed the wounded hound, and I
went with them. The Marquesans had war-clubs and long knives like
undersized machetes. Every Islander carries such a knife for cutting
underbrush or cocoanut-stems, and usually it is his only tool for
building native houses, so that he becomes very expert with it, as
the Filipino with his bolo or the Cuban wi