ce. Why do you not
kill _me_? Ha-ha-ha! Then you could take my property. Then you would
"make big," as you say. My dear sir, that is a "hunch!" That is "sure
fire!" Ha-ha-ha!'--Then I will kick him out in his coolie cotton pants."

After coffee the trader said: "One gallon of the Hollands which you sent
me ashore has disappeared. The kitchen boys are 'careless.' Also I wink
one eye when a schooner arrives. Of course they will dance tonight,
however. You would care to go up, my dear sir?"

Of course we went. There's no other amusement in an islet like Taai but
the interminable native dance. The Dutchman led the way up a narrow,
bushy ravine, guiding me by sound rather than by sight.

"Up this same very path," I heard him, "has gone one uncle of mine. They
pulled him to the advance with one rope around his arms. Then they cut
him up and ate him. But that was many years ago, my dear sir. Now I am
the law. Maybe there shall come, now and then, a Dutch gunboat to have a
look-in. I raise up that flag. The captain shall dine with me. All is
good. But, my dear sir, I am the law."

The "music" began to be heard, a measured monotone of drums, a breath of
voices in a recitative chant, slightly impassioned by that vanished
gallon. The same old thing, indeed; one of the more than fifty-seven
varieties of the island _hula_. Then that had died away.

The light from the "place" grew among the higher leaves. And the trader,
becoming visible, halted. I saw him standing, listening.

"No, my dear sir, but that is a new thing."

He started forward. He stopped again. I heard it now. Out of the
familiar, hollow tautophony of drumbeats there began to emerge a thread
of actual melody--an untraditional rise and fall of notes--a tentative
attack as it were, on the chromatic scale of the west. No he-goat's skin
stretched on bamboo would do that.

We pushed on, curious. We came out into the "place." The scene under the
candlenut torches was as familiar to us as the Ohio River of Uncle Tom
to the small-town schoolboy; the meager rows of three-quarter naked
Kanakas, yellow with saffron and blue with tattooer's ink; the old women
in the background of sultry lights and enormous shadows compounding
endless balls of _popoi_ for the feast; the local and desceptered
chieftain squatting on his hams and guarding the vanished gallon between
his knees; this was all as it should have been. This was the
convention.--But what was really happening on that