house, very little in the way of information was accomplished.
At last, greatly daring, Salesa arrayed herself in her finest clothes,
and with servants carrying gifts of pigs and chickens, went down to the
lagoon to pay a visit to the stranger. She found Professor No No sitting
at his table, looking at dead fish through bits of glass, and he never
turned round as the party halted at the taboo line and coughed
deprecatorily in order to attract his attention. Then Salesa, who feared
neither devil nor man, took the baskets in her arms and stepped across
the taboo, saying in a voice of sweetness, "Professor No No! Professor
No No!"

He sprang from the table and rushed at her, waving his arms, and
screaming as was his wont, "No, no! No, no!" while she, overcome with
terror, dropped the gifts and fled like a sea mew on the wings of the
wind. That night all Uvea joked about her discomfiture, while she sat in
her house and cried, and Billy Hindoo was invited everywhere to tell the
story in the antics that served him in the place of a tongue. But once
Salesa had set her heart on a thing she never faltered nor turned aside;
and though she waited and waited, it was not as one conquered or
resigned. When the quarrel came between Billy Hindoo and his master,
she saw the means, in Professor No No's desolation and abandonment, of
obtaining the satisfaction of her purpose. For the white man, thus left
to himself, grew increasingly dirty and uncared for; and his camp, once
so clean under the care of Billy Hindoo, became as a pigsty of empty
cans and bottles. Nothing therein was washed, and the savor of Professor
No No and his camp blew noisomely across the taboo line as one walked to
leeward.

One day, after spying out that he had already sailed out for more fish
to look at through bits of glass, Salesa crept into the settlement and
began to make it clean again. She carried away all the tins and bottles;
she swept the disordered grass; she entered the professor's tent,
filling his water-bottles, making his bed and decorating it with flowers
and _laumaile_. Then, as she had so often watched Billy Hindoo from a
distance, she spread the table with a clean cloth, and on it she placed
a bottle of beer and a tin of sardines under a wire netting and three
ship's biscuits in a row. Then she went back and hid in the undergrowth,
waiting and waiting, like a warrior in an ambush.

But Professor No No made no sign as he landed from his boat, nor