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South-Sea Idyls

by Charles Warren Stoddard · English · Gutenberg #41573 · 495,661 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: South-Sea Idyls

Author: Charles Warren Stoddard


        
Release date: December 7, 2012 [eBook #41573]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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SOUTH-SEA IDYLS.

by

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.







[Illustration: (Printer's logo)]

Boston:
James R. Osgood and Company,
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873,
by Charles Warren Stoddard,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.




[Decoration]

CONTENTS.


                                                    PAGE

        IN THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP                      7

        CHUMMING WITH A SAVAGE.

            I. KÁNA-ANÁ                               25

            II. HOW I CONVERTED MY CANNIBAL           43

            III. BARBARIAN DAYS                       57

        TABOO.--A FÊTE-DAY IN TAHITI                  80

        JOE OF LAHAINA                               112

        THE NIGHT-DANCERS OF WAIPIO                  128

        PEARL-HUNTING IN THE POMOTOUS                146

        THE LAST OF THE GREAT NAVIGATOR              169

        A CANOE-CRUISE IN THE CORAL SEA              184

        UNDER A GRASS ROOF                           197

        MY SOUTH-SEA SHOW                            202

        THE HOUSE OF THE SUN                         221

        THE CHAPEL OF THE PALMS                      240

        KAHÉLE                                       259

        LOVE-LIFE IN A LANAI                         283

        IN A TRANSPORT                               300

        A PRODIGAL IN TAHITI                         324

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

_TO MY DEAR FRIEND ANTON ROMAN._

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

THE COCOA-TREE.


    Cast on the water by a careless hand,
        Day after day the winds persuaded me:
        Onward I drifted till a coral tree
    Stayed me among its branches, where the sand
        Gathered about me, and I slowly grew,
        Fed by the constant sun and the inconstant dew.

    The sea-birds build their nests against my root,
        And eye my slender body's horny case.
        Widowed within this solitary place
    Into the thankless sea I cast my fruit;
        Joyless I thrive, for no man may partake
        Of all the store I bear and harvest for his sake.

    No more I heed the kisses of the morn;
        The harsh winds rob me of the life they gave;
        I watch my tattered shadow in the wave,
    And hourly droop and nod my crest forlorn,
        While all my fibres stiffen and grow numb
        Beck'ning the tardy ships, the ships that never come!

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

SOUTH-SEA IDYLS.

IN THE CRADLE OF THE DEEP.


Forty days in the great desert of the sea,--forty nights camped under
cloud-canopies, with the salt dust of the waves drifting over us.
Sometimes a Bedouin sail flashed for an hour upon the distant horizon,
and then faded, and we were alone again; sometimes the west, at sunset,
looked like a city with towers, and we bore down upon its glorified
walls, seeking a haven; but a cold gray morning dispelled the illusion,
and our hearts sank back into the illimitable sea, breathing a long
prayer for deliverance.

Once a green oasis blossomed before us,--a garden in perfect bloom,
girded about with creaming waves; within its coral cincture pendulous
boughs trailed in the glassy waters; from its hidden bowers spiced airs
stole down upon us; above all, the triumphant palm-trees clashed their
melodious branches like a chorus with cymbals; yet from the very gates
of this paradise a changeful current swept us onward, and the happy
isle was buried in night and distance.

In many volumes of adventure I had read of sea-perils: I was at last to
learn the full interpretation of their picturesque horrors. Our little
craft, the Petrel, had buffeted the boisterous waves for five long
weeks. Fortunately, the bulk of her cargo was edible: we feared neither
famine nor thirst. Moreover, in spite of the continuous gale that swept
us out of our reckoning, the Petrel was in excellent condition, and, as
far as we could judge, we had no reason to lose confidence in her. It
was the gray weather that tried our patience and found us wanting; it
was the unparalleled pitching of the ninety-ton schooner that
disheartened and almost dismembered us. And then it was wasting time at
sea. Why were we not long before at our journey's end? Why were we not
threading the vales of some savage island, and reaping our rich reward
of ferns and shells and gorgeous butterflies?

The sea rang its monotonous changes,--fair weather and foul, days like
death itself, followed by days full of the revelations of new life, but
mostly days of deadly dulness, when the sea was as unpoetical as an
eternity of cold suds and blueing.

I cannot always understand the logical fitness of things, or, rather, I
am at a loss to know why some things in life are so unfit and illogical.
Of course, in our darkest hour, when we were gathered in the confines
of the Petrel's diminutive cabin, it was our duty to sing psalms of hope
and cheer, but we didn't. It was a time for mutual encouragement: very
few of us were self-sustaining, and what was to be gained by our
combining in unanimous despair?

Our weather-beaten skipper,--a thing of clay that seemed utterly
incapable of any expression whatever, save in the slight facial
contortion consequent to the mechanical movement of his lower jaw,--the
skipper sat, with barometer in hand, eying the fatal finger that pointed
to our doom; the rest of us were lashed to the legs of the centre-table,
glad of any object to fix our eyes upon, and nervously awaiting a turn
in the state of affairs, that was then by no means encouraging.

I happened to remember that there were some sealed letters to be read
from time to time on the passage out, and it occurred to me that one of
the times had come--perhaps the last and only--wherein I might break the
remaining seals and receive a sort of parting visit from the fortunate
friends on shore.

I opened one letter and read these prophetic lines: "Dear child,"--she
was twice my age, and privileged to make a pet of me,--"dear child, I
have a presentiment that we shall never meet again in the flesh."

That dear girl's intuition came near to being the death of me. I
shuddered where I sat, overcome with remorse. It was enough that I had
turned my back on her and sought consolation in the treacherous bosom of
the ocean; that, having failed to find the spring of immortal life in
human affection, I had packed up and emigrated, content to fly the ills
I had in search of change; but that parting shot, below the water-line
as it were,--that was more than I asked for, and something more than I
could stomach. I returned to watch with the rest of our little company,
who clung about the table with a pitiful sense of momentary security,
and an expression of pathetic condolence on every countenance, as though
each was sitting out the last hours of the others.

Our particular bane that night was a crusty old sea-dog whose memory of
wrecks and marine disasters of every conceivable nature was as complete
as an encyclopædia. This "old man of the sea" spun his tempestuous yarn
with fascinating composure, and the whole company was awed into silence
with the haggard realism of his narrative. The cabin must have been
air-tight,--it was as close as possible,--yet we heard the shrieking of
the wind as it tore through the rigging, and the long hiss of the waves
rushing past us with lightning speed. Sometimes an avalanche of foam
buried us for a moment, and the Petrel trembled like a living thing
stricken with sudden fear; we seemed to be hanging on the crust of a
great bubble that was, sooner or later, certain to burst, and let us
drop into its vast, black chasm, where, in Cimmerian darkness, we should
be entombed forever.

The scenic effect, as I then considered, was unnecessarily vivid; as I
now recall it, it seems to me strictly in keeping and thoroughly
dramatic. At any rate, you might have told us a dreadful story with
almost fatal success.

I had still one letter left, one bearing this suggestive legend: "To be
read in the saddest hour." Now, if there is a sadder hour in all time
than the hour of hopeless and friendless death, I care not to know of
it. I broke the seal of my letter, feeling that something charitable and
cheering would give me strength. A few dried leaves were stored within
it. The faint fragrance of summer bowers reassured me: somewhere in the
blank world of waters there was land, and there Nature was kind and
fruitful; out over the fearful deluge this leaf was born to me in the
return of the invisible dove my heart had sent forth in its extremity. A
song was written therein, perhaps a song of triumph. I could now silence
the clamorous tongue of our sea-monster, who was glutting us with tales
of horror, for a jubilee was at hand, and here was the first note of its
trumpets.

I read:--

    "Beyond the parting and the meeting
          I shall be soon;
    Beyond the farewell and the greeting,
    Beyond the pulse's fever-beating,
        I shall be soon."

I paused. A night black with croaking ravens, brooding over a slimy
hulk, through whose warped timbers the sea oozed,--that was the sort of
picture that rose before me. I looked further for a crumb of comfort:--

    "Beyond the gathering and the strewing,
          I shall be soon;
    Beyond the ebbing and the flowing,
    Beyond the coming and the going,
          I shall be soon."

A tide of ice-water seemed rippling up and down my spinal column; the
marrow congealed within my bones. But I recovered. When a man has supped
full of horror and there is no immediate climax, he can collect himself
and be comparatively brave. A reaction restored my soul.

Once more the melancholy chronicler of the ill-fated Petrel resumed his
lugubrious narrative. I resolved to listen, while the skipper eyed the
barometer, and we all rocked back and forth in search of the centre of
gravity, looking like a troupe of mechanical blockheads nodding in
idiotic unison. All this time the little craft drifted helplessly, "hove
to" in the teeth of the gale.

The sea-dog's yarn was something like this: He once knew a lonesome man
who floated about in a waterlogged hulk for three months; who saw all
his comrades starve and die, one after another, and at last kept watch
alone, craving and beseeching death. It was the stanch French brig
Mouette, bound south into the equatorial seas. She had seen rough
weather from the first: day after day the winds increased, and finally a
cyclone burst upon her with insupportable fury. The brig was thrown upon
her beam-ends, and began to fill rapidly. With much difficulty her masts
were cut away, she righted, and lay in the trough of the sea rolling
like a log. Gradually the gale subsided, but the hull of the brig was
swept continually by the tremendous swell, and the men were driven into
the foretop cross-trees, where they rigged a tent for shelter and
gathered what few stores were left them from the wreck. A dozen wretched
souls lay in their stormy nest for three whole days in silence and
despair. By this time their scanty stores were exhausted, and not a drop
of water remained; then their tongues were loosened, and they railed at
the Almighty. Some wept like children, some cursed their fate. One man
alone was speechless,--a Spaniard, with a wicked light in his eye, and a
repulsive manner that had made trouble in the forecastle more than once.

When hunger had driven them nearly to madness they were fed in an almost
miraculous manner. Several enormous sharks had been swimming about the
brig for some hours, and the hungry sailors were planning various
projects for the capture of them. Tough as a shark is, they would
willingly have risked life for a few raw mouthfuls of the same.
Somehow, though the sea was still and the wind light, the brig gave a
sudden lurch and dipped up one of the monsters, who was quite secure in
the shallow aquarium between the gunwales. He was soon despatched, and
divided equally among the crew. Some ate a little, and reserved the rest
for another day; some ate till they were sick, and had little left for
the next meal. The Spaniard with the evil eye greedily devoured his
portion, and then grew moody again, refusing to speak with the others,
who were striving to be cheerful, though it was sad enough work.

When the food was all gone save a few mouthfuls that one meagre eater
had hoarded to the last, the Spaniard resolved to secure a morsel at the
risk of his life. It had been a point of honor with the men to observe
sacredly the right of ownership, and any breach of confidence would have
been considered unpardonable. At night, when the watch was sleeping, the
Spaniard cautiously removed the last mouthful of shark hidden in the
pocket of his mate, but was immediately detected and accused of theft.
He at once grew desperate, struck at the poor wretch whom he had robbed,
missed his blow, and fell headlong from the narrow platform in the
foretop, and was lost in the sea. It was the first scene in the mournful
tragedy about to be enacted on that limited stage.

There was less disturbance after the disappearance of the Spaniard. The
spirits of the doomed sailors seemed broken; in fact, the captain was
the only one whose courage was noteworthy, and it was his indomitable
will that ultimately saved him.

One by one the minds of the miserable men gave way; they became peevish
or delirious, and then died horribly. Two, who had been mates for many
voyages in the seas north and south, vanished mysteriously in the night;
no one could tell where they went or in what manner, though they seemed
to have gone together.

Somehow, these famishing sailors seemed to feel assured that their
captain would be saved; they were as confident of their own doom, and to
him they intrusted a thousand messages of love. They would lie around
him,--for few of them had strength to assume a sitting posture,--and
reveal to him the story of their lives. It was most pitiful to hear the
confessions of these dying men. One said: "I wronged my friend; I was
unkind to this one or to that one; I deserve the heaviest punishment God
can inflict upon me"; and then he paused, overcome with emotion. But
another took up the refrain: "I could have done much good, but I would
not, and now it is too late." And a third cried out in his despair, "I
have committed unpardonable sins, and there is no hope for me. Lord
Jesus, have mercy!" The youngest of these perishing souls was a mere
lad; he, too, accused himself bitterly. He began his story at the
beginning, and continued it from time to time as the spirit of
revelation moved him; scarcely an incident, however insignificant,
escaped him in his pitiless retrospect. O, the keen agony of that boy's
recital! more cruel than hunger or thirst, and in comparison with which
physical torture would have seemed merciful and any death a blessing.

While the luckless Mouette drifted aimlessly about, driven slowly onward
by varying winds under a cheerless sky, sickness visited them. Some were
stricken with scurvy; some had lost the use of their limbs and lay
helpless, moaning and weeping hour after hour; vermin devoured them; and
when their garments were removed, and cleansed in the salt water, there
was scarcely sunshine enough to dry them before night, and they were put
on again, damp, stiffened with salt, and shrunken so as to cripple the
wearers, who were all blistered and covered with boils. The nights were
bitter cold: sometimes the icy moon looked down upon them; sometimes the
bosom of an electric cloud burst over them, and they were enveloped for
a moment in a sheet of flame. Sharks lingered about them, waiting to
feed upon the unhappy ones who fell into the sea overcome with physical
exhaustion, or who cast themselves from that dizzy scaffold, unable
longer to endure the horrors of lingering death. Flocks of sea-fowl
hovered over them; the hull of the Mouette was crusted with barnacles;
long skeins of sea-grass knotted themselves in her gaping seams; myriads
of fish darted in and out among the clinging weeds, sporting gleefully;
schools of porpoises leaped about them, lashing the sea into foam;
sometimes a whale blew his long breath close under them. Everywhere was
the stir of jubilant life,--everywhere but under the tattered awning
stretched in the foretop of the Mouette.

Days and weeks dragged on. When the captain would waken from his
sleep,--which was not always at night, however, for the nights were
miserably cold and sleepless,--when he wakened he would call the roll.
Perhaps some one made no answer; then he would reach forth and touch the
speechless body and find it dead. He had not strength now to bury the
corpses in the sea's sepulchre; he had not strength even to partake of
the unholy feast of the inanimate flesh. He lay there in the midst of
pestilence; and at night, under the merciful veil of darkness, the fowls
of the air gathered about him and bore away their trophy of corruption.

By and by there were but two left of all that suffering crew,--the
captain and the boy,--and these two clung together like ghosts, defying
mortality. They strove to be patient and hopeful: if they could not eat,
they could drink, for the nights were dewy, and sometimes a mist covered
them,--a mist so dense it seemed almost to drip from the rags that
poorly sheltered them. A cord was attached to the shrouds, the end of it
carefully laid in the mouth of a bottle slung in the rigging. Down the
thin cord slid occasional drops; one by one they stole into the bottle,
and by morning there was a spoonful of water to moisten those parched
lips,--sweet, crystal drops, more blessed than tears, for _they_ are
salt; more precious than pearls. A thousand prayers of gratitude seemed
hardly to quiet the souls of the lingering ones for that great charity
of Heaven.

There came a day when the hearts of God's angels must have bled for the
suffering ones. The breeze was fresh and fair; the sea tossed gayly its
foam-crested waves; sea-birds soared in wider circles; and the clouds
shook out their fleecy folds, through which the sunlight streamed in
grateful warmth. The two ghosts were talking, as ever, of home, of
earth, of land. Land,--land anywhere, so that it were solid and broad.
O, to pace again a whole league without turning! O, to pause in the
shadow of some living tree! To drink of some stream whose waters flowed
continually; flowed, though you drank of them with the awful thirst of
one who has been denied water for weeks and and weeks and weeks, for
three whole months,--an eternity, as it seemed to them.

Then they pictured life as it might be if God permitted them to return
to earth once more. They would pace K---- Street at noon, and revisit
that capital restaurant where many a time they had feasted, though in
those days they were unknown to one another; they would call for coffee,
and this dish and that dish, and a whole bill of fare, the thought of
which made their feverish palates grow moist again. They would meet
friends whom they had never loved as they now loved them; they would
reconcile old feuds and forgive everybody everything; they held
imaginary conversations, and found life very beautiful and greatly to be
desired; and somehow they would get back to the little _café_ and there
begin eating again, and with a relish that brought the savory tastes and
smells vividly before them, and their lips would move and the impalpable
morsels roll sweetly over their tongues.

It had become a second nature to scour the horizon with jealous eyes;
never for a moment during their long martyrdom had their covetous sight
fixed upon a stationary object. But it came at last. Out of a cloud a
sail burst like a flickering flame. What an age it was a coming! how it
budded and blossomed like a glorious white flower, that was transformed
suddenly into a bark bearing down upon them! Almost within hail it
stayed its course, the canvas fluttered in the wind; the dark hull
slowly rose and fell upon the water; figures moved to and fro,--men,
living and breathing men! Then the ghosts staggered to their feet and
cried to God for mercy. Then they waved their arms, and beat their
breasts, and lifted up their imploring voices, beseeching deliverance
out of that horrible bondage. Tears coursed down their hollow cheeks,
their limbs quaked, their breath failed them; they sank back in despair,
speechless and forsaken.

Why did they faint in the hour of deliverance when that narrow chasm was
all that separated them from renewed life? Because the bark spread out
her great white wings and soared away, hearing not the faint voices,
seeing not the thin shadows that haunted that drifting wreck. The
forsaken ones looked out from their eyrie, and watched the lessening
sail until sight failed them; and then the lad, with one wild cry,
leaped toward the speeding bark, and was swallowed up in the sea.

Alone in a wilderness of waters. Alone, without compass or rudder, borne
on by relentless winds into the lonesome, dreary, shoreless ocean of
despair, within whose blank and forbidding sphere no voyager ventures;
across whose desolate waste dawn sends no signal and night brings no
reprieve; but whose sun is cold, and whose moon is clouded, and whose
stars withdraw into space, and where the insufferable silence of vacancy
shall not be broken for all time.

O pitiless Nature! thy irrevocable laws argue sore sacrifice in the
waste places of God's universe!...

The Petrel gave a tremendous lurch, that sent two or three of us into
the lee corners of the cabin; a sea broke over us, bursting in the
companion-hatch, and half filling our small and insecure retreat. The
swinging lamp was thrown from its socket and extinguished; we were
enveloped in pitch darkness, up to our knees in salt water. There was a
moment of awful silence; we could not tell whether the light of day
would ever visit us again; we thought perhaps it wouldn't. But the
Petrel rose once more upon the watery hill-tops and shook herself free
of the cumbersome deluge; and at that point, when she seemed to be
riding more easily than usual, some one broke the silence: "Well, did
the captain of the Mouette live to tell the tale?"

Yes, he did. God sent a messenger into the lonesome deep, where the
miserable man was found insensible, with eyes wide open against the
sunlight, and lips shrunken apart,--a hideous, breathing corpse. When he
was lifted in the arms of the brave fellows who had gone to his rescue,
he cried, "Great God! am I saved?" as though he couldn't believe it when
it was true; then he fainted, and was nursed through a long delirium,
and was at last restored to health and home and happiness.

Our cabin-boy managed to fish up the lamp, and after a little we were
illuminated; the agile swab soon sponged out the cabin, and we resumed
our tedious watch for dawn and fairer weather.

Somehow, my mind brooded over the solitary wreck that was drifting about
the sea. I could fancy the rotten timbers of the Mouette clinging
together, by a miracle, until the Ancient Mariner was taken away from
her, and then, when she was alone again, with nothing whatever in sight
but blank blue sea and blank blue sky, she lay for an hour or so,
bearded with shaggy sea-moss and looking about a thousand years old.
Suddenly it occurred to her that her time had come,--that she had
outlived her usefulness, and might as well go to pieces at once. So she
yawned in all her timbers, and the sea reached up over her, and laid
hold of her masts, and seemed to be slowly drawing her down into its
bosom. There was not an audible sound, and scarcely a ripple upon the
water; but when the waves had climbed into the foretop, there was a
clamor of affrighted birds, and a myriad bubbles shot up to the surface,
where a few waifs floated and whirled about for a moment. It was all
that marked the spot where the Mouette went down to her eternal rest.

"Ha, ha!" cried our skipper, with something almost like a change of
expression on his mahogany countenance, "the barometer is rising!" and
sure enough it was. In two hours the Petrel acted like a different craft
entirely, and by and by came daybreak, and after that the sea went down,
down, down, into a deep, dead calm, when all the elements seemed to have
gone to sleep after their furious warfare. Like half-drowned flies we
crawled out of the close, ill-smelling cabin to dry ourselves in the
sun: there, on the steaming deck of the schooner, we found new life, and
in the hope that dawned with it we grew lusty and jovial.

Such a flat, oily sea as it was then! So transparent that we saw great
fish swimming about, full fathom five under us. A monstrous shark
drifted lazily past, his dorsal fin now and then cutting the surface
like a knife and glistening like polished steel, his brace of pilot-fish
darting hither and thither, striped like little one-legged harlequins.

Flat-headed gonies sat high on the water, piping their querulous note as
they tugged at something edible, a dozen of them entering into the
domestic difficulty: one after another would desert the cause, run a
little way over the sea to get a good start, leap heavily into the air,
sail about for a few minutes, and then drop back on the sea,
feet-foremost, and skate for a yard or two, making a white mark and a
pleasant sound as it slid over the water.

The exquisite nautilus floated past us, with its gauzy sail set, looking
like a thin slice out of a soap-bubble; the strange anemone laid its
pale, sensitive petals on the lips of the wave and panted in ecstasy;
the Petrel rocked softly, swinging her idle canvas in the sun; we heard
the click of the anchor-chain in the forecastle, the blessedest
seasound I wot of; a sailor sang while he hung in the ratlines and
tarred down the salt-stained shrouds. The afternoon waned; the man at
the wheel struck two bells,--it was the delectable dog-watch. Down went
the swarthy sun into his tent of clouds; the waves were of amber; the
fervid sky was flushed; it looked as though something splendid were
about to happen up there, and that it could hardly keep the secret much
longer. Then came the purplest twilight; and then the sky blossomed all
over with the biggest, ripest, goldenest stars,--such stars as hang like
fruits in sun-fed orchards; such stars as lay a track of fire in the
sea; such stars as rise and set over mountains and beyond low green
capes, like young moons, every one of them; and I conjured up my spells
of savage enchantment, my blessed islands, my reefs baptized with silver
spray; I saw the broad fan-leaves of the banana droop in the motionless
air, and through the tropical night the palms aspired heavenward, while
I lay dreaming my sea-dream in the cradle of the deep.

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

CHUMMING WITH A SAVAGE.


PART I.

KÁNA-ANÁ.

There was a little brown rain-cloud, that blew over in about three
minutes; and Bolabola's thatched hut was dry as a haystack in less than
half that time. Those tropical sprays are not much, anyhow; so I lounged
down into the banana-patch, for I thought I saw something white there,
something white and fluttering, moving about. I knew pretty well what it
was, and didn't go after it on an uncertainty.

The Doctor looked savage. Whenever he slung those saddle-bags over his
left shoulder, and swung his right arm clean out from his body, like the
regulator of a steam-engine, you might know that his steam was pretty
well up. I turned to look back, as he was strapping up his beast of
burden till the poor animal's body was positively waspish; then he
climbed into his saddle, and sullenly plunged down the trail toward the
precipice, and never said "Good by," or "God bless you," or any of those
harmless tags that come in so well when you don't know how to cut off
your last words.

I solemnly declare, and this without malice, the Doctor was perfectly
savage.

Now, do you know what demoralized that Doctor? how we came to a
misunderstanding? or why we parted company? It was simply because here
was a glorious valley, inhabited by a mild, half-civilized people, who
seemed to love me at first sight. I don't believe I disliked them,
either. Well! they asked me to stop with them, and I felt just like it.
I wanted to stop and be natural; but the Doctor thought otherwise of my
intentions; and that was the origin of the row.

The next thing I knew, the Doctor had got up the great precipice, and I
was quite alone with two hundred dusky fellows, only two of whom could
speak a syllable of English, and I the sole representative of the
superior white within twenty miles. Alone with cannibals,--perhaps they
were cannibals. They had magnificent teeth, at any rate, and could bite
through an inch and a half sugar-cane, and not break a jaw.

For the first time that summer I began to moralize a little. Was it best
to have kicked against the Doctor's judgment? Perhaps not! But it is
best to be careful how you begin to moralize too early; you deprive
yourself of a great deal of fun in that way. If you want to do anything
particularly, I should advise you to do it, and then be sufficiently
sorry to make it all square.

I'm not so sure that I was wrong, after all. Fate, or the Doctor, or
something else, brought me first to this loveliest of valleys, so shut
out from everything but itself that there were no temptations which
might not be satisfied. Well! here, as I was looking about at the
singular loveliness of the place,--you know this was my first glimpse of
its abrupt walls, hung with tapestries of fern and clambering
convolvulus; at one end two exquisite waterfalls, rivalling one another
in whiteness and airiness, at the other the sea, the real South Sea,
breaking and foaming over a genuine reef, and even rippling the placid
current of the river that slipped quietly down to its embracing tide
from the deep basins at these waterfalls,--right in the midst of all
this, before I had been ten minutes in the valley, I saw a straw hat,
bound with wreaths of fern and _maile_; under it a snow-white garment,
rather short all around, low in the neck, and with no sleeves whatever.

There was no sex to that garment; it was the spontaneous offspring of a
scant material and a large necessity. I'd seen plenty of that sort of
thing, but never upon a model like this, so entirely tropical,--almost
Oriental. As this singular phenomenon made directly for me, and, having
come within reach, there stopped and stayed, I asked its name, using one
of my seven stock phrases for the purpose; I found it was called
Kána-aná. Down it went into my note-book; for I knew I was to have an
experience with this young scion of a race of chiefs. Sure enough, I
have had it. He continued to regard me steadily, without embarrassment.
He seated himself before me; I felt myself at the mercy of one whose
calm analysis was questioning every motive of my soul. This sage
inquirer was, perhaps, sixteen years of age. His eye was so earnest and
so honest, I could return his look. I saw a round, full, rather girlish
face; lips ripe and expressive, not quite so sensual as those of
most of his race; not a bad nose, by any means; eyes perfectly
glorious,--regular almonds,--with the mythical lashes "that sweep,"
etc., etc. The smile which presently transfigured his face was of the
nature that flatters you into submission against your will.

Having weighed me in his balance,--and you may be sure his instincts
didn't cheat him; they don't do that sort of thing,--he placed his two
hands on my two knees, and declared, "I was his best friend, as he was
mine; I must come at once to his house, and there live always with him."
What could I do but go? He pointed me to his lodge across the river,
saying, "There was his home and mine." By this time, my _native_ without
a master was quite exhausted. I wonder what would have happened if some
one hadn't come to my rescue, just at that moment of trial, with a fresh
vocabulary? As it was, we settled the matter at once. This was our
little plan,--an entirely private arrangement between Kána-aná and
myself: I was to leave with the Doctor in an hour; but, at the
expiration of a week we should both return hither; then I would stop
with him, and the Doctor could go his way.

There was an immense amount of secrecy, and many vows, and I was almost
crying, when the Doctor hurried me up that terrible precipice, and we
lost sight of the beautiful valley. Kána-aná swore he would watch
continually for my return, and I vowed I'd hurry back; and so we parted.
Looking down from the heights, I thought I could distinguish his white
garment; at any rate, I knew the little fellow was somewhere about,
feeling as miserably as I felt,--and nobody has any business to feel
worse. How many times I thought of him through the week! I was always
wondering if he still thought of me. I had found those natives to be
impulsive, demonstrative, and, I feared, inconstant. Yet why should he
forget me, having so little to remember in his idle life, while I could
still think of him, and put aside a hundred pleasant memories for his
sake? The whole island was a delight to me. I often wondered if I should
ever again behold such a series of valleys, hills, and highlands in so
small a compass. That land is a world in miniature, the dearest spot of
which, to me, was that secluded valley; for there was a young soul
watching for my return.

That was rather a slow week for me, but it ended finally; and just at
sunset, on the day appointed, the Doctor and I found ourselves back on
the edge of the valley. I looked all up and down its green expanse,
regarding every living creature, in the hope of discovering Kána-aná in
the attitude of the watcher. I let the Doctor ride ahead of me on the
trail to Bolabola's hut, and it was quite in the twilight when I heard
the approach of a swift horseman. I turned, and at that moment there was
a collision of two constitutions that were just fitted for one another;
and all the doubts and apprehensions of the week just over were
indignantly dismissed, for Kána-aná and I were one and inseparable,
which was perfectly satisfactory to both parties!

The plot, which had been thickening all the week, culminated then, much
to the disgust of the Doctor, who had kept his watchful eye upon me all
these days--to my advantage, as he supposed. There was no disguising our
project any longer, so I out with it as mildly as possible. "There was a
dear fellow here," I said, "who loved me, and wanted me to live with
him; all his people wanted me to stop, also; his mother and his
grandmother had specially desired it. They didn't care for money; they
had much love for me, and therefore implored me to stay a little. Then
the valley was most beautiful; I was tired; after our hard riding, I
needed rest; his mother and his grandmother assured me that I needed
rest. Now, why not let me rest here awhile?"

The Doctor looked very grave. I knew that he misunderstood me,--placed a
wrong interpretation upon my motives; the worse for him, I say. He tried
to talk me over to the paths of virtue and propriety; but I wouldn't be
talked over. Then the final blast was blown; war was declared at once.
The Doctor never spoke again, but to abuse me; and off he rode in high
dudgeon, and the sun kept going down on his wrath. Thereupon I renounced
all the follies of this world, actually hating civilization, and feeling
entirely above the formalities of society. I resolved on the spot to be
a barbarian, and, perhaps, dwell for ever and ever in this secluded
spot. And here I am back to the beginning of this story, just after the
shower at Bolabola's hut, as the Doctor rode off alone and in anger.

That resolution was considerable for me to make. I found, by the time
the Doctor was out of sight and I was quite alone, with the natives
regarding me so curiously, that I was very tired indeed. So Kána-aná
brought up his horse, got me on to it in some way or other, and mounted
behind me to pilot the animal and sustain me in my first bareback act.
Over the sand we went, and through the river to his hut, where I was
taken in, fed, and petted in every possible way, and finally put to bed,
where Kána-aná monopolized me, growling in true savage fashion if any
one came near me. I didn't sleep much, after all. I think I must have
been excited. I thought how strangely I was situated: alone in a
wilderness, among barbarians; my bosom friend, who was hugging me like a
young bear, not able to speak one syllable of English, and I very shaky
on a few bad phrases in his tongue. We two lay upon an enormous
old-fashioned bed with high posts,--very high they seemed to me in the
dim rushlight. The natives always burn a small light after dark; some
superstition or other prompts it. The bed, well stocked with pillows, or
cushions, of various sizes, covered with bright-colored chintz, was hung
about with numerous shawls, so that I might be dreadfully modest behind
them. It was quite a grand affair, gotten up expressly for my benefit.
The rest of the house--all in one room, as usual--was covered with mats,
on which various recumbent forms and several individual snores betrayed
the proximity of Kána-aná's relatives. How queer the whole atmosphere of
the place was! The heavy beams of the house were of some rare wood,
which, being polished, looked like colossal sticks of peanut candy.
Slender canes were bound across this framework, and the soft, dried
grass of the meadows was braided over it,--all completing our tenement,
and making it as fresh and sweet as new-mown hay.

The natives have a passion for perfumes. Little bunches of
sweet-smelling herbs hung in the peak of the roof, and wreaths of
fragrant berries were strung in various parts of the house. I found our
bedposts festooned with them in the morning. O, that bed! It might have
come from England in the Elizabethan era and been wrecked off the coast;
hence the mystery of its presence. It was big enough for a Mormon. There
was a little opening in the room opposite our bed; you might call it a
window, I suppose. The sun, shining through it, made our tent of shawls
perfectly gorgeous in crimson light, barred and starred with gold. I
lifted our bed-curtain, and watched the rocks through this window,--the
shining rocks, with the sea leaping above them in the sun. There were
cocoa-palms so slender they seemed to cast no shadow, while their
fringed leaves glistened like frost-work as the sun glanced over them. A
bit of cliff, also, remote and misty, running far into the sea, was just
visible from my pyramid of pillows. I wondered what more I could ask for
to delight the eye. Kána-aná was still asleep, but he never let loose
his hold on me, as though he feared his pale-faced friend would fade
away from him. He lay close by me. His sleek figure, supple and graceful
in repose, was the embodiment of free, untrammelled youth. You who are
brought up under cover know nothing of its luxuriousness. How I longed
to take him over the sea with me, and show him something of life as we
find it. Thinking upon it, I dropped off into one of those delicious
morning naps. I awoke again presently; my companion-in-arms was the
occasion this time. He had awakened, stolen softly away, resumed his
single garment,--said garment and all others he considered superfluous
after dark,--and had prepared for me, with his own hands, a breakfast,
which he now declared to me, in violent and suggestive pantomime, was
all ready to be eaten. It was not a bad bill of fare,--fresh fish, taro,
poe, and goat's milk. I ate as well as I could, under the circumstances.
I found that Robinson Crusoe must have had some tedious rehearsals
before he acquired that perfect resignation to Providence which delights
us in book form. There was a veritable and most unexpected table-cloth
for me alone. I do not presume to question the nature of its miraculous
appearance. Dishes there were,--dishes, if you're not particular as to
shape or completeness; forks, with a prong or two,--a bent and
abbreviated prong or two; knives that had survived their handles; and
one solitary spoon. All these were tributes of the too generous people,
who, for the first time in their lives, were at the inconvenience of
entertaining a distinguished stranger. Hence this reckless display of
tableware. I ate as well as I could, but surely not enough to satisfy my
crony; for, when I had finished eating, he sat about two hours in deep
and depressing silence, at the expiration of which time he suddenly
darted off on his bareback steed and was gone till dark, when he
returned with a fat mutton slung over his animal. Now, mutton
doesn't grow wild thereabout, neither were his relatives shepherds;
consequently, in eating, I asked no questions for conscience' sake.

The series of entertainments offered me were such as the little valley
had not known for years: canoe-rides up and down the winding stream;
bathings in the sea and in the river, and in every possible bit of
water, at all possible hours; expeditions into the recesses of the
mountains, to the waterfalls that plunged into cool basins of fern and
cresses, and to the orange grove through acres and acres of guava
orchards; some climbings up the precipices; goat hunting, once or twice,
as far as a solitary cavern, said to be haunted,--these tramps always by
daylight; then a new course of bathings and sailings, interspersed with
monotonous singing and occasional smokes under the eaves of the hut at
evening.

If it is a question how long a man may withstand the seductions of
nature, and the consolations and conveniences of the state of nature, I
have solved it in one case; for I was as natural as possible in about
three days.

I wonder if I was growing to feel more at home, or more hungry, that I
found an appetite at last equal to any table that was offered me!
Chicken was added to my already bountiful rations, nicely cooked by
being swathed in a broad, succulent leaf, and roasted or steeped in hot
ashes. I ate it with my fingers, using the leaf for a platter.

Almost every day something new was offered at the door for my
edification. Now, a net full of large guavas or mangoes, or a sack of
leaves crammed with most delicious oranges from the mountains, that
seemed to have absorbed the very dew of heaven, they were so fresh and
sweet. Immense lemons perfumed the house, waiting to make me a capital
drink. Those superb citrons, with their rough, golden crusts, refreshed
me. Cocoa-nuts were heaped at the door; and yams, grown miles away, were
sent for, so that I might be satisfied. All these additions to my table
were the result of long and vigorous arguments between the respective
heads of the house. I detected trouble and anxiety in their expressive
faces. I picked out a word, here and there, which betrayed their secret
sorrow. No assertions, no remonstrances on my part, had the slightest
effect upon the poor souls, who believed I was starving. Eat I must, at
all hours and in all places; and eat, moreover, before they would touch
a mouthful. So Nature teaches her children a hospitality which all the
arts of the capital cannot affect.

I wonder what it was that finally made me restless and eager to see new
faces! Perhaps my unhappy disposition, that urged me thither, and then
lured me back to the pride of life and the glory of the world. Certain I
am that Kána-aná never wearied me with his attentions, though they were
incessant. Day and night he was by me. When he was silent, I knew he was
conceiving some surprise in the shape of a new fruit, or a new view to
beguile me. I was, indeed, beguiled; I was growing to like the little
heathen altogether too well. What should I do when I was at last
compelled to return out of my seclusion, and find no soul so faithful
and loving in all the earth beside? Day by day this thought grew upon
me, and with it I realized the necessity of a speedy departure.

There were those in the world I could still remember with that
exquisitely painful pleasure that is the secret of true love. Those
still voices seemed incessantly calling me, and something in my heart
answered them of its own accord. How strangely idle the days had grown!
We used to lie by the hour--Kána-aná and I--watching a strip of sand on
which a wild poppy was nodding in the wind. This poppy seemed to me
typical of their life in the quiet valley. Living only to occupy so much
space in the universe, it buds, blossoms, goes to seed, dies, and is
forgotten.

These natives do not even distinguish the memory of their great dead, if
they ever had any. It was the legend of some mythical god that Kána-aná
told me, and of which I could not understand a twentieth part; a god
whose triumphs were achieved in an age beyond the comprehension of the
very people who are delivering its story, by word of mouth, from
generation to generation. Watching the sea was a great source of
amusement with us. I discovered in our long watches that there is a very
complicated and magnificent rhythm in its solemn song. This wave that
breaks upon the shore is the heaviest of a series that preceded it; and
these are greater and less, alternately, every fifteen or twenty
minutes. Over this dual impulse the tides prevail, while through the
year there is a variation in their rise and fall. What an intricate and
wonderful mechanism regulates and repairs all this!

There was an entertainment in watching a particular cliff, in a peculiar
light, at a certain hour, and finding soon enough that change visited
even that hidden quarter of the globe. The exquisite perfection of this
moment, for instance, is not again repeated on to-morrow, or the day
after, but in its stead appears some new tint or picture, which,
perhaps, does not satisfy like this. That was the most distressing
disappointment that came upon us there. I used to spend half an hour in
idly observing the splendid curtains of our bed swing in the light air
from the sea; and I have speculated for days upon the probable destiny
awaiting one of those superb spiders, with a tremendous stomach and a
striped waistcoat, looking a century old, as he clung tenaciously to the
fringes of our canopy.

We had fitful spells of conversation upon some trivial theme, after
long intervals of intense silence. We began to develop symptoms of
imbecility. There was laughter at the least occurrence, though quite
barren of humor; also, eating and drinking to pass the time; bathing to
make one's self cool, after the heat and drowsiness of the day. So life
flowed out in an unruffled current, and so the prodigal lived riotously
and wasted his substance. There came a day when we promised ourselves an
actual occurrence in our Crusoe life. Some one had seen a floating
object far out at sea. It might be a boat adrift; and, in truth, it
looked very like a boat. Two or three canoes darted off through the surf
to the rescue, while we gathered on the rocks, watching and ruminating.
It was long before the rescuers returned, and then they came
empty-handed. It was only a log after all, drifted, probably, from
America. We talked it all over, there by the shore, and went home to
renew the subject; it lasted us a week or more, and we kept harping upon
it till that log--drifting slowly, O how slowly! from the far mainland
to our island--seemed almost to overpower me with a sense of the
unutterable loneliness of its voyage. I used to lie and think about it,
and get very solemn, indeed; then Kána-aná would think of some fresh
appetizer or other, and try to make me merry with good feeding. Again
and again he would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was
lying, and insist upon my gorging myself, when I had but barely
recovered from a late orgie of fruit, flesh, or fowl. He would mesmerize
me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing
manipulation. It was a reminiscence of the baths of Stamboul not to be
withstood. From this sleep I would presently be wakened by Kána-aná's
performance upon a rude sort of harp, that gave out a weird and
eccentric music. The mouth being applied to the instrument, words were
pronounced in a guttural voice, while the fingers twanged the strings in
measure. It was a flow of monotones, shaped into legends and lyrics. I
liked it amazingly; all the better, perhaps, that it was as good as
Greek to me, for I understood it as little as I understood the strange
and persuasive silence of that beloved place, which seemed slowly but
surely weaving a spell of enchantment about me. I resolved to desert
peremptorily, and managed to hire a canoe and a couple of natives, to
cross the channel with me. There were other reasons for this prompt
action.

Hour by hour I was beginning to realize one of the inevitable results of
Time. My boots were giving out; their best sides were the uppers, and
their soles had about left them. As I walked, I could no longer disguise
this pitiful fact. It was getting hard on me, especially in the gravel.
Yet, regularly each morning, my pieces of boot were carefully oiled;
then rubbed, or petted, or coaxed into some sort of a polish, which was
a labor of love. O Kána-aná! how could you wring my soul with those
touching offices of friendship!---those kindnesses unfailing,
unsurpassed!

Having resolved to sail early in the morning, before the drowsy citizens
of the valley had fairly shaken the dew out of their forelocks, all that
day--my last with Kána-aná--I breathed about me silent benedictions and
farewells. I could not begin to do enough for Kána-aná, who was, more
than ever, devoted to me. He almost seemed to suspect our sudden
separation, for he clung to me with a sort of subdued desperation. That
was the day he took from his head his hat--a very neat one, plaited by
his mother--insisting that I should wear it (mine was quite in tatters),
while he went bareheaded in the sun. That hat hangs in my room now, the
only tangible relic of my prodigal days. My plan was to steal off at
dawn, while he slept; to awaken my native crew, and escape to sea before
my absence was detected. I dared not trust a parting with him, before
the eyes of the valley. Well, I managed to wake and rouse my sailor
boys. To tell the truth, I didn't sleep a wink that night. We launched
the canoe, entered, put off, and had safely mounted the second big
roller just as it broke under us with terrific power, when I heard a
shrill cry above the roar of the waters. I knew the voice and its
import. There was Kána-aná rushing madly toward us; he had discovered
all, and couldn't even wait for that white garment, but ran after us
like one gone daft, and plunged into the cold sea, calling my name, over
and over, as he fought the breakers. I urged the natives forward. I knew
if he overtook us, I should never be able to escape again. We fairly
flew over the water. I saw him rise and fall with the swell, looking
like a seal; for it was his second nature, this surf-swimming. I believe
in my heart I wished the paddles would break or the canoe split on the
reef, though all the time I was urging the rascals forward; and they,
like stupids, took me at my word. They couldn't break a paddle, or get
on the reef, or have any sort of an accident. Presently we rounded the
headland,--the same hazy point I used to watch from the grass house,
through the little window, of a sunshiny morning. There we lost sight of
the valley and the grass house, and everything that was associated with
the past,--but that was nothing. We lost sight of the little sea-god,
Kána-aná, shaking the spray from his forehead like a porpoise; and this
was all in all. I didn't care for anything else after that, or anybody
else, either. I went straight home and got civilized again, or partly
so, at least. I've never seen the Doctor since, and never want to. He
had no business to take me there, or leave me there. I couldn't make up
my mind to stay; yet I'm always dying to go back again.

So I grew tired over my husks. I arose and went unto my father. I
wanted to finish up the Prodigal business. I ran and fell upon his neck
and kissed him, and said unto him, "Father, _if_ I have sinned against
Heaven and in thy sight, I'm afraid I don't care much. Don't kill
anything. I don't want any calf. Take back the ring, I don't deserve it;
for I'd give more this minute to see that dear, little, velvet-skinned,
coffee-colored Kána-aná, than anything else in the wide world,--because
he hates business, and so do I. He's a regular brick, father, moulded of
the purest clay, and baked in God's sunshine. He's about half sunshine
himself; and, above all others, and more than any one else ever can, he
loved your Prodigal."


PART II.

HOW I CONVERTED MY CANNIBAL.

When people began asking me queer questions about my chum Kána-aná, some
of them even hinting that "he might possibly have been a girl all the
time," I resolved to send down for him, and settle the matter at once. I
knew he was not a girl, and I thought I should like to show him some
American hospitality, and perhaps convert him before I sent him back
again.

I could teach him to dress, you know; to say a very good thing to your
face, and a very bad one at your back; to sleep well in church, and
rejoice duly when the preacher got at last to the "Amen." I might do all
this for his soul's sake; but I wanted more to see how the little fellow
was getting on. I missed him so terribly,--his honest way of showing
likes and dislikes; his confidence in his intuitions and fidelity to his
friends; and those quaint manners of his, so different from anything in
vogue this side of the waters.

That is what I remarked when I got home again, and found myself growing
as practical and prosy as ever. I awoke no kindred chord in the family
bosom. On the contrary, they all said, "It was no use to think of it: no
good could come out of Nazareth." The idea of a heathen and his
abominable idolatry being countenanced in the sanctity of a Christian
home was too dreadful for anything. But I believed some good might come
out of Nazareth, and I believed that, when it did come, it was the
genuine article, worth hunting for, surely. I thought it all over
soberly, finally resolving to do a little missionary work on my own
account. So I wrote to the Colonel of the Royal Guards, who knows
everybody and has immense influence everywhere, begging him to catch
Kána-aná, when his folks weren't looking, and send him to my address,
marked C. O. D., for I was just dying to see him. That was how I
trapped my little heathen and began to be a missionary, all by myself.

I informed the Colonel it was a case of life and death, and he seemed to
realize it, for he managed to get Kána-aná away from his distressed
relatives (their name is legion, and they live all over the island), fit
him out in _real_ clothing,--the poor little wretch had to be dressed,
you know; we all do it in this country,--then he packed him up and
shipped him, care of the captain of the bark S----. When he arrived, I
took him right to my room and began my missionary work. I tried to make
all the people love him, but I'm afraid they found it hard work. He
wasn't half so interesting up here anyhow! I seemed to have been
regarding him through chromatic glasses, which glasses being suddenly
removed, I found a little, dark-skinned savage, whose clothes fitted him
horribly, and appeared to have no business there. Boots about twice too
long, the toes being heavily charged with wadding; in fact, he looked
perfectly miserable, and I've no doubt he felt so. How he had been
studying English on the voyage up! He wanted to be a great linguist, and
had begun in good earnest. He said "good mornin'" as boldly as possible
about seven P. M., and invariably spoke of the women of America as
"him." He had an insane desire to spell, and started spelling-matches
with everybody, at the most inappropriate hours and inconvenient places.
He invariably spelled God d-o-g; when duly corrected,--thus, G-o-d,--he
would triumphantly shout, _dog_. He jumped at these irreverent
conclusions about twenty times a day.

What an experience I had, educating my little savage! Walking him in the
street by the hour; answering questions on all possible topics; spelling
up and down the blocks; spelling from the centre of the city to the
suburbs and back again, and around it; spelling one another at
spelling,--two latter-day peripatetics on dress parade, passing to and
fro in high and serene strata of philosophy, alike unconscious of the
rudely gazing and insolent citizens, or the tedious calls of labor. A
spell was over us: we ran into all sorts of people, and trod on many a
corn, loafing about in this way. Some of the victims objected in harsh
and sinful language. I found Kána-aná had so far advanced in the
acquirement of our mellifluous tongue as to be very successful in
returning their salutes. I had the greatest difficulty in convincing him
of the enormity of his error. The little convert thought it was our mode
of greeting strangers, equivalent to their more graceful and poetic
password, _Aloha_, "Love to you."

My little cannibal wasn't easily accustomed to his new restraints, such
as clothes, manners, and forbidden water-privileges. He several times
started on his daily pilgrimage without his hat; once or twice, to save
time, put his coat on next his skin; and though I finally so far
conquered him as to be sure that his shirt would be worn on the inside
instead of the outside of his trousers (this he considered a great waste
of material), I was in constant terror of his suddenly disrobing in the
street and plunging into the first water we came to,--which barbarous
act would have insured his immediate arrest, perhaps confinement; and
that would have been the next thing to death in his case.

So we perambulated the streets and the suburbs, daily growing into each
other's grace; and I was thinking of the propriety of instituting a
series of more extended excursions, when I began to realize that my
guest was losing interest in our wonderful city and the possible
magnitude of her future.

He grew silent and melancholy; he quit spelling entirely, or only
indulged in rare and fitful (I am pained to add, fruitless) attempts at
spelling God in the orthodox fashion. It seemed almost as though I had
missed my calling; certainly, I was hardly successful as a missionary.

The circus failed to revive him; the beauty of our young women he
regarded without interest. He was less devout than at first, when he
used to insist upon entering every church we came to and sitting a few
moments, though frequently we were the sole occupants of the building.
He would steal away into remote corners of the house, and be gone for
hours. Twice or three times I discovered him in a dark closet, _in puris
naturalibus_, toying with a singular shell strung upon a feather chain.
The feathers of the chain I recognized as those of a strange bird held
as sacred among his people. I began to suspect the occasion of his
malady: he believed himself bewitched or accursed of some one,--a common
superstition with the dark races. This revelation filled me with alarm;
for he would think nothing of lying down to die under the impression
that it was his fate, and no medicine under the heaven could touch him
further.

I began telling him of my discovery, begging his secret from him. In
vain I besought him. "It was his trouble; he must go back!" I told him
he should go back as soon as possible; that we would look for ourselves,
and see when a vessel was to sail again. I took him among the wharves,
visiting, in turn, nearly all the shipping moored there. How he lingered
about them, letting his eyes wander over the still bay into the mellow
hazes that sometimes visit our brown and dusty hills!

His nature seemed to find an affinity in the tranquil tides, the
far-sweeping distances, the alluring outlines of the coast, where it was
blended with the sea-line in the ever-mysterious horizon. After these
visitations, he seemed loath to return again among houses and people;
they oppressed and suffocated him.

One day, as we were wending our way to the city front, we passed
a specimen of grotesque carving, in front of a tobacconist's
establishment. Kána-aná stood eying the painted model for a moment, and
then, to the amazement and amusement of the tobacconist and one or two
bystanders, fell upon his knees before it, and was for a few moments
lost in prayer. It seemed to do him a deal of good, as he was more
cheerful after his invocation,--for that day, at least; and we could
never start upon any subsequent excursion without first visiting this
wooden Indian, which he evidently mistook for a god.

He began presently to bring tributes, in the shape of small
cobble-stones, which he surreptitiously deposited at the feet of his
new-found deity, and passed on, rejoicing. His small altar grew from day
to day, and his spirits were lighter as he beheld it unmolested, thanks
to the indifference of the tobacconist and the street contractors.

His greatest trials were within the confines of the bath-tub. He who had
been born to the Pacific, and reared among its foam and breakers, now
doomed to a seven-by-three zinc box and ten inches of water! He would
splash about like a trout in a saucer, bemoaning his fate. Pilgrimages
to the beach were his greatest delight; divings into the sea, so far
from town that no one could possibly be shocked, even with the
assistance of an opera-glass. He used to implore a daily repetition of
these cautious and inoffensive recreations, though, once in the chilly
current, he soon came out of it, shivering and miserable. Where were his
warm sea-waves, and the shining beach, with the cocoa-palms quivering in
the intense fires of the tropical day? How he missed them and mourned
for them, crooning a little chant in their praises, much to the
disparagement of our dry hills, cold water, and careful people!

In one of our singular walks, when he had been unusually silent, and I
had sought in vain to lift away the gloom that darkened his soul, I was
startled by a quick cry of joy from the lips of the young exile,--a cry
that was soon turned into a sharp, prolonged, and pitiful wail of sorrow
and despair. We had unconsciously approached an art-gallery, the deep
windows of which were beautified with a few choice landscapes in oil.
Kána-aná's restless and searching eye, doubtless attracted by the
brilliant coloring of one of the pictures, seemed in a moment to
comprehend and assume the rich and fervent spirit with which the artist
had so successfully imbued his canvas.

It was the subject which had at first delighted Kána-aná,--the splendid
charm of its manipulation which so affected him, holding him there
wailing in the bitterness of a natural and incontrollable sorrow. The
painting was illuminated with the mellowness of a tropical sunset. A
transparent light seemed to transfigure the sea and sky. The artist had
wrought a miracle in his inspiration. It was a warm, hazy, silent sunset
forever. The outline of a high, projecting cliff was barely visible in
the flood of misty glory that spread over the face of it,--a cliff whose
delicate tints of green and crimson pictured in the mind a pyramid of
leaves and flowers. A valley opened its shadowy depths through the
sparkling atmosphere, and in the centre of this veiled chasm the pale
threads of two waterfalls seemed to appear and disappear, so exquisitely
was the distance imitated. Gilded breakers reeled upon a palm-fringed
shore; and the whole was hallowed by the perpetual peace of an unbroken
solitude.

I at once detected the occasion of Kána-aná's agitation. Here was the
valley of his birth,--the cliff, the waterfall, the sea, copied
faithfully, at that crowning hour when they are indeed supernaturally
lovely. At that moment, the promise to him of a return would have been
mockery. He was there in spirit, pacing the beach, and greeting his
companions with that liberal exchange of love peculiar to them. Again he
sought our old haunt by the river, watching the sun go down. Again he
waited listlessly the coming of night.

It was a wonder that the police did not march us both off to the
station-house; for the little refugee was howling at the top of his
lungs, while I endeavored to quiet him by bursting a sort of vocal
tornado about his ears. I then saw my error. I said to myself, "I have
transplanted a flower from the hot sand of the Orient to the hard clay
of our more material world,--a flower too fragile to be handled, if
never so kindly. Day after day it has been fed, watered, and nourished
by Nature. Every element of life has ministered to its development in
the most natural way. Its attributes are God's and Nature's own. I bring
it hither, set it in our tough soil, and endeavor to train its sensitive
tendrils in one direction. There is no room for spreading them here,
where we are overcrowded already. It finds no succulence in its cramped
bed, no warmth in our practical and selfish atmosphere. It withers from
the root upward; its blossoms are falling; it will die!" I resolved it
should not die. Unfortunately, there was no bark announced to sail for
his island home within several weeks. I could only devote my energies to
keeping life in that famishing soul until it had found rest in the
luxurious clime of its nativity.

At last the bark arrived. We went at once to see her; and I could hardly
persuade the little homesick soul to come back with me at night. He who
was the fire of hospitality and obliging to the uttermost, at home, came
very near to mutiny just then.

It was this civilization that had wounded him, till the thought of his
easy and pleasurable life among the barbarians stung him to madness.
Should he ever see them again, his lovers? ever climb with the
goat-hunters among the clouds yonder? or bathe, ride, sport, as he used
to, till the day was spent and the night come?

Those little booths near the wharves, where shells, corals, and
gold-fish are on sale, were Kána-aná's favorite haunts during the last
few days he spent here. I would leave him seated on a box or barrel by
one of those epitomes of Oceanica, and return two hours later, to find
him seated as I had left him, and singing some weird _méle_,--some
legend of his home. These musical diversions were a part of his nature,
and a very grave and sweet part of it, too. A few words, chanted on a
low note, began the song, when the voice would suddenly soar upward with
a single syllable of exceeding sweetness, and there hang trembling in
bird-like melody till it died away with the breath of the singer.

Poor, longing soul! I would you had never left the life best suited to
you,--that liberty which alone could give expression to your wonderful
capacities. Not many are so rich in instincts to read Nature, to
translate her revelations, to speak of her as an orator endowed with her
surpassing eloquence.

It will always be a sad effort, thinking of that last night together.
There are hours when the experiences of a lifetime seem compressed and
crowded together. One grows a head taller in his soul at such times,
and perhaps gets suddenly gray, as with a fright, also.

Kána-aná talked and talked in his pretty, broken English, telling me of
a thousand charming secrets; expressing all the natural graces that at
first attracted me to him, and imploring me over and over to return with
him and dwell in the antipodes. How near I came to resolving, then and
there, that I _would go_, and take the consequences,--how very near I
came to it! He passed the night in coaxing, promising, entreating; and
was never more interesting or lovable. It took just about all the moral
courage allotted me to keep on this side of barbarism on that eventful
occasion; and in the morning Kána-aná sailed, with a face all over
tears, and agony, and dust.

I begged him to select something for a remembrancer; and of all that
ingenuity can invent and art achieve he chose a metallic chain for his
neck,--chose it, probably, because it glittered superbly, and was good
to string charms upon. He gave me the greater part of his wardrobe,
though it can never be of any earthly use to me, save as a memorial of a
passing joy in a life where joys seem to have little else to do than be
brief and palatable.

He said he "should never want them again"; and he said it as one might
say something of the same sort in putting by some instrument of
degradation,--conscious of renewed manhood, but remembering his late
humiliation, and bowing to that remembrance.

So Kána-aná, and the bark, and all that I ever knew of genuine,
spontaneous, and unfettered love sailed into the west, and went down
with the sun in a glory of air, sea, and sky, trebly glorious that
evening. I shall never meet the sea when it is bluest without thinking
of one who is its child and master. I shall never see mangoes and
bananas without thinking of him who is their brother, born and brought
up with them. I shall never smell cassia, or clove, or jessamine, but a
thought of Kána-aná will be borne upon their breath. A flying skiff,
land in the far distance rising slowly, drifting sea-grasses, a clear
voice burdened with melody,--all belong to him, and are a part of him.

I resign my office. I think that, perhaps, instead of my having
converted the little cannibal, he may have converted me. I am sure, at
least, that if we two should begin a missionary work upon one another, I
should be the first to experience the great change. I sent my convert
home, feeling he wasn't quite so good as when I first got him; and I
truly wish him as he was.

       *       *       *       *       *

I can see you, my beloved,--sleeping, naked, in the twilight of the
west. The winds kiss you with pure and fragrant lips. The sensuous waves
invite you to their embrace. Earth again offers you her varied store.
Partake of her offering, and be satisfied. Return, O troubled soul! to
your first and natural joys: they were given you by the Divine hand
that can do no ill. In the smoke of the sacrifice ascends the prayer of
your race. As the incense fadeth and is scattered upon the winds of
heaven, so shall your people separate, nevermore to assemble among the
nations. So perish your superstitions, your necromancies, your ancient
arts of war, and the unwritten epics of your kings.

Alas, Kána-aná! As the foam of the sea you love, as the fragrance of the
flower you worship, shall your precious body be wasted, and your
untrammelled soul pass to the realms of your fathers.

Our day of communion is over. Behold how Night extends her wings to
cover you from my sight! She may, indeed, hide your presence; she may
withhold from me the mystery of your future: but she cannot take from me
that which I have; she cannot rob me of the rich influences of your
past.

Dear comrade, pardon and absolve your spiritual adviser, for seeking to
remould so delicate and original a soul as yours; and, though neither
prophet nor priest, I yet give you the kiss of peace at parting, and the
benediction of unceasing love.


PART III.

BARBARIAN DAYS.

We had been watching intently the faint, shadowy outline along the
horizon, and wondering whether it were really land, or but a cloudy
similitude of it; while we bore down upon it all the afternoon in fine
style, and the breeze freshened as evening came on. It was all clear
sailing, and we were in pretty good spirits,--which is not always the
case with landsmen at sea.

Sitting there on the after-deck, I had asked myself, more than once, If
life were made up of placid days like this, how long would life be
sweet? I gave it up every time; for one is not inclined to consider so
curiously as to press any problem to a solution in those indolent
latitudes.

Perhaps it was Captain Kidd who told me he had sailed out of a
twelve-knot breeze on a sudden,--slipping off the edges of it, as it
were,--and found his sails all aback as he slid into a dead calm. There,
rocking in still weather, he saw another bark, almost within hail, blown
into the west and out of sight, like a bird in a March gale.

I wonder what caused me to think of Kidd's experiences just then? I
can't imagine, unless it was some prescient shadow floating in my
neighborhood,--the precursor of the little event that followed. Such
things do happen, and when we least expect it; though, fortunately, they
don't worry us as a general thing. I didn't worry at all, but sat there
by myself, while some of my fellow-passengers took a regular
"constitutional" up and down the deck, and over and over it, until the
nervous woman below in the cabin "blessed her stars," and wished herself
ashore.

I preferred sitting and pondering over the cloud that seemed slowly to
rise from the sea, assuming definite and undeniable appearances of land.

I knew very well what land it must be: one of a group of islands every
inch of which I had traversed with the zeal of youthful enthusiasm; but
which of them, was a question I almost feared to have answered. Yet,
what difference could it make to me! The land was providentially in our
course, but not on our way-bill. If we were within gunshot of its
loveliest portion, we must needs pass on as frigidly as though it were
Charybdis, or something equally dreadful; and I began to think it might
be something of the sort, because of its besetting temptations.

There was not the slightest doubt as to the certainty of its being land,
when we went down to supper; and at sunset we knew the dark spots were
valleys, and the bright ones hills. I fancied a hundred bronze-hued
faces were turned toward us, as we seemed to twinkle away off in their
sunset sea like a fallen star, or something of that sort. I thought I
could almost hear the sea beating upon the crusts of the reef in the
twilight; but perhaps I didn't, for the land was miles away, and night
hid it presently, while the old solitude of the ocean impressed us all
as though we were again in the midst of its unbroken, circular wastes.
Then they played whist in the cabin,--all but me. I hung over the ship's
side, resolved to watch all night for the lights on shore,--the
flickering watch-fires in the mountain camps; for I knew I should see
them, as we were bound to pass the island before morning.

The night was intensely dark; clouds muffled the stars, and not a spark
of light was visible in any direction over the waters. A shower could
easily have quenched the beacons I was seeking, and my vigil soon became
tedious; so presently I followed the others and turned in, rather
disconsolate and disgusted.

Toward midnight the wind fell rapidly, and within half an hour we found
ourselves in a dead calm, when the moan of the breakers was quite
audible on our starboard quarter. The Captain was nervous and watchful;
the currents in the channel were strong, and he saw, by the variation in
the compass, that the vessel was being whirled in a great circle around
a point of the island.

Fortunately it began to get light before the danger grew imminent. At
three o'clock we were within soundings, and shortly after we plumped the
anchor into the rough coral at the bottom of a pretty little harbor,
where, the Captain informed us, we must ride all day and get out with
the land-breeze, that would probably come down at night. I rushed up in
the gray dawn, and bent my gaze upon the shore. I think I must have
turned pale, or trembled a little, or done something sensational and
appropriate, though no one observed it; whereat I was rather glad, on
the whole, for they could not have understood it if I had done my best
to explain,--which I had not the least idea of doing, however, for it
was none of their affair.

I knew that place the moment I saw it,--the very spot of all I most
desired to see; and I resolved, in my secret soul, to go ashore, there
and then; amicably if I might, forcibly if I must.

The Captain was not over-genial that morning, either; he hated
detention, and was a trifle nervous about being tied up under the lee of
the land for twelve or twenty hours. So he growled if any one approached
him all that day, and positively refused to allow the ship's boat to be
touched, unless we drifted upon the rocks, broadside,--which, he seemed
to think, was not entirely out of the question. I was sure there would
be a canoe--perhaps several--alongside by sunrise; so I said nothing,
but waited in silence, determined to desert when the time came; and the
Captain might whistle me back if he could.

Presently the time came. We were rocking easily on the swell, directly
to the eastward of a deep valley. The sky was ruddy; the air fresh and
invigorating, but soft as the gales of Paradise. We were in the tropics.
You would have known it with your eyes shut; the whole wonderful
atmosphere confessed it. But, with your eyes open, those white birds,
sailing like snow-flakes through the immaculate blue heavens, with
tail-feathers like our pennant; the floating gardens of the sea, through
which we had been ruthlessly ploughing for a couple of days back; the
gorgeous sunrises and sunsets,--all were proofs positive of our
latitude.

What a sunrise it was on that morning! Yet I stood with my back to it,
looking west; for there I saw, firstly, the foam on the reef--as crimson
as blood--falling over the wine-stained waves; then it changed as the
sun ascended, like clouds of golden powder, indescribably magnificent,
shaken and scattered upon the silver snow-drifts of the coral reef,
dazzling to behold, and continually changing.

Beyond it, in the still water, was reflected a long, narrow strip of
beach; above it, green pastures and umbrageous groves, with native huts,
like great bird's-nests, half hidden among them; and the weird, slender
cocoa-palms were there,--those exclamation-points in the poetry of
tropic landscape. All this lay slumbering securely between high walls of
verdure; while at the upper end, where the valley was like a niche set
in the green and glorious mountains, two waterfalls floated downward
like smoke-columns on a heavy morning. Angels and ministers of grace! do
you, in your airy perambulations, visit haunts more lovely than
this?--as lovely as that undiscovered country from whose bourn the
traveller would rather not look back, premising that the traveller were
as singularly constituted as I am; which is, per-adventure, not
probable.

They knew it was morning almost as soon as we did, though they lived a
few furlongs farther west, and had no notion of the immediate proximity
of a strange craft,--by no means rakish in her rig, however; only a
simple merchantman, bound for Auckland from San Francisco, but the
victim of circumstances, and, in consequence, tied to the bottom of the
sea when half-way over.

They knew it was morning. I saw them swarming out of their grassy nests,
brown, sleek-limbed, and naked. They regarded with amazement our
floating home. The news spread, and the groves were suddenly peopled
with my dear barbarians, who hate civilization almost as much as I do,
and are certainly quite as idolatrous and indolent as I ever aspire to
be.

I turned my palms outward toward them; I lifted up my voice, and cried,
"Hail, my brothers! We hasten with the morning; we follow after the sun.
Greetings to you, dwellers in the West!"

Nobody heard me. I looked again. Down they came upon the shore, wading
into the sea. Then such a carnival as they celebrated in the shallow
water was a novelty for some of my cabin friends; but I knew all about
it. I'd done the same thing often enough myself, when I was young, and
free, and innocent, and savage. I knew they were asking themselves a
thousand questions as to our sudden appearance in their seas, and would
rather like to know who we were, and where we were going, but scorned to
ask us. They had once or twice been visited by the same sort of
whitish-looking people, and they had found those colorless faces
uncivil, and the bleached-out skins by no means to be trusted with those
whom they considered their inferiors. They didn't know that it is one of
the Thirty-nine Articles of Civilization to bully one's way through the
world. Then I prayed that they might be moved to send out a canoe, so
that I could debark and go inland for the day. I prayed very earnestly,
and out she came,--one of their tiny, fragile canoes, looking like a
deserted chrysalis, with the invisible wings of the spiritual, tutelary
butterfly wafting it over the waves. In this chrysalis dug-out sat a
tough little body, with a curly head, which I recognized in a minute as
belonging to a once friend and comrade in my delightful exile, when I
was a successful prodigal, and wasted my substance in the most startling
and effectual manner, and enjoyed it a great deal better than if I had
kept it in the bank, as they advised me to do. On he came, beating the
sea with his broad paddle, alternately by either side of the canoe, and
regarding us with a commendable degree of suspicion. I greeted him in
his peculiar dialect. The gift of tongues seemed suddenly to have
descended upon me, for I found little difficulty in saying everything I
wanted to say, in a remarkably brief space of time.

"Hail, little friend!" said I; "great love to you. How is it on shore
now?"

He replied that it was decidedly nice on shore now, and that his love
for me was as much as mine for him, and more too, and that consequently
he was prepared to conduct me thither, regardless of expense.

I went with that lovely boy on shore. The Captain could not resist my
persuasive appeals for a short leave of absence, and so I went. Perhaps
it would not have been advisable for him to have suppressed me; and he
made a courteous virtue of necessity.

I had leave to stop till evening, unless I heard a signal-gun, upon
hearing which I was to return immediately on board, or suffer the
consequences.

Now, I am free to confess, that the consequences didn't appall me as we
swung off from the vessel, where I had been an uneasy prisoner for many
days; and I fell to chatting with Niga, my dusky friend, in a sort of
desperate joy.

Niga was a regular trump. He had more than once piled on horseback
behind me, in the sweet days when we used to ride double,--yea, and even
treble, if necessary. There was usually a great deal more boy than horse
on the premises; hence this questionable economy in our cavalry
regulations. Niga told me many things as we drew near the reef: he
talked of nearly everybody and everything; but of all that he told me,
he said nothing of the one I most longed to hear about. Yet, somehow or
other, I could not quite bring myself to ask him, out and out, this
question. You know, sometimes it is hard to shape words just as you want
them shaped, and the question is never asked in consequence.

The reef was growling tremendously. We were drawing nearer to it
every moment. I thought the chances were against us; but Niga was
self-possessed, and, as he had crossed it once that morning,--and in the
more dangerous direction of the two, that is, against the grain of the
waves,--I concluded there was no special need of my making a scene; and
in the next moment we were poised on a terrific cataract of glittering
and rushing breakers, snatched up and held trembling in mid-air, with
the canoe half filled with water, and I perfectly blind with spray.

It was a memorable moment in a very short voyage; and the general
verdict on board ship, where they were watching us with some interest,
was, that it served me right.

When my eyes were once more free of the water, I found myself in the
midst of the natives, who had been waiting just inside of the reef to
receive us; and, as they recognized me, they laid a hand on the canoe,
as many as could crowd about it, fairly lifting it out of the water on
our way to the shore, all the while wailing at the top of their voices
their mournful and desolate wail.

It was impossible for me to decide whether that chant of theirs was an
expression of joy, or sorrow: the nature of it is precisely the same, in
either case.

So we went on shore in our little triumphal procession, and there I was
embraced in a very emphatic manner by savages of every conceivable sex,
age, and color. Having mutely submitted to their genuine expressions of
love, I was conducted--a willing and bewildered captive--along the
beach, around the little point that separates the river from the sea,
and thence by the river-bank to the house I knew so well. I believe I
looked at every dusky face in that assemblage, two or three times over,
but saw not the one I sought.

What could it mean? Was he hunting in the mountains, or fishing beyond
the headland, or sick, or in prison, that he came not to greet me?
Surely, something had befallen him,--something serious and unusual,--or
he would have been the first to welcome me home to barbarism!

A strange dread clouded my mind: it increased and multiplied as we
passed on toward the house that had been home to me. Then, having led me
to the outer door, the people all sat there upon the ground, and began
wailing piteously.

I hastily crossed the narrow outer room, lifted the plaited curtain, and
entered the inner chamber, where I had spent my strange, wild holiday
long months before. I looked earnestly about me, while my eyes gradually
became familiar with the dull light. Nothing seemed changed. I could
point at once to almost every article in the room. It seemed but
yesterday that I had stolen away from them in the gray dawn, and
repented my desertion too late.

I soon grew accustomed to the sombre light of the room. I saw sitting
about me, in the corners, bowed figures, with their faces hidden in
grief. There was no longer any doubt as to the nature of their emotion.
It was grief that had stricken the household, and the grief that death
alone occasions. I counted every figure in the room; I recognized each,
the same that I had known when I dwelt among them: he alone was absent.

I don't know what possessed me at that moment. I felt an almost
uncontrollable desire to laugh, as though it were some _masque_ gotten
up for my amusement. Then I wished they would cease their masking, for
I felt too miserable to laugh. Then I was utterly at a loss to know what
to do; so I walked to the old-fashioned bed--our old-fashioned bed--in
the corner, looking just as it used to. I think the same old spider was
there still, clinging to the canopy; the very same old fellow, in his
harlequin tights, that we used to watch, and talk about, and wonder what
he was thinking of, to stop so still, day after day, and week after
week, up there on the canopy. I threw myself upon the edge of the bed,
my feet resting upon the floor; and there I tried to think of everything
but that one dreadful reality that would assert itself, in spite of my
efforts to deny it.

Where was my friend? Where could he be, that these, his friends, were so
bowed with sorrow? The question involved a revelation, already
anticipated in my mind. That revelation I dreaded as I would dread my
own death-sentence. But it came at last. A woman who had been humbling
herself in the dust moved toward me from the shadow that half concealed
her. She did not rise to her feet; she was half reclining on the mats of
the floor, her features veiled in the long, black hair of her race. One
hand was extended toward me, then the other; the body followed; and so
she moved, slowly and painfully, toward the bedside.

It was his mother. I knew her intuitively. Close to the bed she came,
and crouched by me, upon the floor. There, with one hand clasped close
over mine, the other flooded with her copious tears, and her forehead
bowed almost to the floor, she poured forth the measure of her woe. The
moment her voice was heard, those out of the house ceased wailing, and
seemed to be listening to the elegy of the bereaved.

Her voice was husky with grief; broken again and again with sobs. I
seemed to understand perfectly the nature of her story, though my
knowledge of the dialect was very deficient.

The mother's soul was quickened with her pathetic theme. The frenzy of
the poet inspired her lips. It was an epic she was chanting, celebrating
the career of her boy-hero. She told of his birth, and wonderful
childhood; of his beautiful strength; of his sublime affection, and the
friend it had brought him from over the water.

She referred frequently to our former associations, and seemed to
delight in dwelling upon them. Then came the story of his death,--the
saddest canto of the melancholy whole.

How shall I ever forgive myself the selfish pleasure I took in striving
to remodel an immortal soul? What business had I to touch so sensitive
an organism; susceptible of infinite impressions, but incapable, in its
prodigality, of separating and dismissing the evil, and retaining only
the good,--therefore fit only to increase and develop in the suitable
atmosphere with which the Creator had surrounded it?

Why did I not foresee the climax?

I might have known that one reared in the nursery of Nature, as free to
speak and act as the very winds of heaven to blow whither they list,
could ill support the manacles of our modern proprieties. Of what use to
him could be a knowledge of the artifices of society? Simply a
temptation and a snare!

What was the story of his fate? That he came safely home, rejoicing in
his natural freedom; that he could not express his delight at finding
home so pleasant; that his days were spent in telling of the wonderful
things he had seen: more sects than the gods of the South Seas; more
doubters than believers; contradictions, and insults, and suspicions,
everywhere. They laughed again, when they thought of us, and pitied us
all the while.

But his exhilaration wore off, after a time. Then came the reaction. A
restlessness; an undefined, unsatisfied longing. Life became a burden.
The seed of dissension had fallen in fresh and fallow soil: it was a
souvenir of his sojourn among us. He, the child of Nature, must now
follow out the artificial and hollow life of the world, or die
unsatisfied; for he could not return to his original sphere of trust and
contentment. He had learned to doubt all things, as naturally as any of
us.

For days he moaned in spirit, and was troubled; nothing consoled him;
his soul was broken of its rest; he grew desperate and melancholy.

I believe he was distracted with the problem of society, and I cannot
wonder at it. One day, when his condition had become no longer
endurable, he stole off to sea in his canoe, thinking, perhaps, that he
could reach this continent, or some other; possibly hoping never again
to meet human faces, for he could not trust them.

It was his heroic exit from a life that no longer interested him. Great
was the astonishment of the Islanders, who looked upon him as one
possessed of the Evil Spirit, and special sacrifices were offered in his
behalf; but the gods were inexorable; and, after several days upon the
solitary sea, a shadow, a mote, drifted toward the valley,--a canoe,
with a famishing and delirious voyager, that was presently tossed and
broken in the surges; then, a dark body glistened for a moment, wet with
spray, and sank forever, while the shining coral reef was stained with
the blood of the first-born.

I heard it all in the desolate wail of the mother, yet could not weep;
my eyes burned like fire.

Little Niga came for me presently, and led me into the great grove of
_kamane_-trees, up the valley. He insisted upon holding me by the hand:
it was all he could do to comfort me, and he did that with his whole
soul.

In silence we pressed on to one of the largest of the trees. I
recognized it at once. Niga and I, one day, went thither, and I cut a
name upon the soft bark of the tree.

When we reached it we paused. Niga pointed with his finger; I looked. It
was there yet,--a simple name, carved in the rudest fashion. I read the
letters, which had since become an epitaph. They were these:--

        "KÁNA-ANÁ, _Æt. 16 yrs._"

Under them were three initials,--my own,--cut by the hand of Kána-aná,
after his return from America.

We sat down in the gloomy grove. "Tell me," I said, "tell me, Niga,
where has his spirit gone?"

"He is here, now," said Niga; "he can see us. Perhaps, some day, we
shall see him."

"You have more faith than our philosophers, for they have reasoned
themselves out of everything. Would you like to be a philosopher, Niga?"
I asked.

Niga thought, if they were going to die, body and soul, that he wouldn't
like to be anything of the sort, and that he had rather be a first-class
savage than a fourth-rate Christian, any day.

I interrupted him at this alarming assertion. "The philosophers would
call your faith a superstition, Niga; they do not realize that there is
no true faith unmixed with superstition, since faith implies a belief in
something unseen, and is, therefore, itself a superstition. Blessed is
the man who believes blindly,--call it what you please,--for peace shall
dwell in his soul. But, Niga," I continued, "where is God?"

"Here, and here, and here," said Niga, pointing me to a grotesque
carving in the sacred grove, to a monument upon the distant precipice,
and to a heap of rocks in the sea; and the smile of recognition with
which the little votary greeted his idols was a solemn proof of his
sincerity.

"Niga," I said, "we call you and your kind heathens. It is a harmless
anathema, which cannot, in the least, affect you personally. Ask us if
we love God! Of course we do. Do we love him above all things, animate
or inanimate? Undoubtedly! Undoubtedly is easily said, and let us give
ourselves credit for some honesty. We believe that we do love God, above
all; that we have no other gods before him; yet, who of us will give up
wealth, home, friends, and follow him? Not one! The God we love is a
very vague, invisible, forbearing essence. He can afford to be lenient
with us while we are debating whether our neighbor is serving him in the
right fashion, or not. We'd rather not have other gods before him: one
is as many as we find it convenient to serve. The lover kisses
passionately a miniature. It is not, however, an image of his Creator,
nor any memorial of his Redeemer's passion, but only a portrait of his
mistress. Do you blame us, Niga? It is the strongest instinct of our
nature to worship something. Man is a born idolater, and not one of us
is exempted by reason of any scruples under the sun. You see it daily
and hourly: each one has his idols."

Little Niga, who sympathized deeply with me, seemed to have gotten some
knowledge of our peculiarly mixed theories concerning God and the future
state, from conversations overheard after the return of Kána-aná. He
tried to console me with the assurance that Kána-aná died a devoted and
unshaken adherent to the faith of his fathers.

I couldn't but feel that his blood was off my hands when I learned this;
and I believe I gave Niga a regular hug in that moment of joy.

Then we walked here and there, through the valley, and visited the old
haunts, made memorable by many incidents in that romantic and chivalrous
life of the South. Every one we met had some word to add concerning the
Pride of the Valley, dead in his glorious youth.

Over and over, they assured me of his fidelity to me, his white brother,
adding that Kána-aná had, more than once, expressed the deepest regret
at not having brought me back with him.

He even meditated sending for me, in the same manner that I had sent
for him; and, if he had done so, it was his purpose to see that I was at
once made familiar with their Articles of Faith; for he anticipated a
willing convert in me, and it was the desire of his heart that I should
know that perfect trust, peculiar to his people, and which is begotten
of the brief gospel, so often quoted out of place: namely, that "seeing
is believing."

It was a kind thought of his, and I wish he had carried it into
execution, for then he might have lived. It was his susceptible nature
that had come in contact with the great world, and received its
death-wound. Had I been there to help him, I would have planned
something to divert his mind until he had recovered himself, and was
willing to submit to the monotony of life over yonder. Had he not done
as much for me? Had he not striven, day after day, to charm me with his
barbarism, and come very near to success? I should say he had. Dear
little martyr! was he not the only boy I ever truly loved,--dead now in
his blossoming prime!

O Kána-aná! Little Niga and I sat talking of you, down by the sea, and
we wept for you at last; for the tears came by and by, when I began to
fully realize the greatness of my loss. All your youth, and beauty, and
freshness, in destruction, and your body swallowed up in the graves of
the sea!

The meridian sun blazed overhead, but it made little difference to us.
Afternoon passed, and evening was coming on almost unheeded; for our
thoughts were buried with him, under the waves, and life was nothing to
us, then.

I no longer cared to observe the lights and shadows on the cliffs, nor
the poppy nodding in the wind, nor the seaward prospect: that was
spoiled by our vessel,--the seclusion was broken in upon. I cared for
nothing any longer, for I missed everywhere his step, patient and
faithful as a dog's, and his marvellous face, that could look steadily
at the sun without winking, and deluge itself with laughter all the
while, for there was nothing hidden or corrupting in it.

Presently I returned into the sacred grove, touching the three letters
he had carved there, and calling on his spirit to regard me as
respecting his dumb idols, which were nothing but the representatives of
his jealous gods,--dear to him as the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of
Olives, and the shining summits of Calvary to us. Then down I ran to the
bathing-pools, and from place to place I wandered in a hurried and
nervous tour, for it was growing dark. I saw the ship's lights
flickering over the water, while the first cool whispers of the
night-wind came down from the hills, filling me with warnings; in the
midst of which there was a flash of flame and a sudden, thunderous
report,--enough to awaken the dead of the valley,--and I turned to go.
I believe, if dear Kána-aná had been there, as I prayed he might be, I
would have laughed at that signal, and hastened inland to avoid
discovery; for I was sick of the world. I might have had reason to
regret it afterward, because friendship is not elastic, and the best of
friends cannot long submit to being bored by the best of fellows.
Perhaps it was just as it should be: I had no time to consider the
matter there. I hurried to his mother, and she clung to me; others came
about me, and laid hold of me: so that I feared I should be held captive
until it was too late to board the vessel. Her sails were even then
shaking in the wind; and I heard the faint click of the capstan tugging
at the anchor-chains.

With a quick impulse I broke away from them, and ran to the beach, where
Niga and I entered his canoe, and slid off from the sloping sands. Down
we drifted toward the open sea, while the natives renewed their wailing,
and I was half crazed with sorrow. It is impossible to resist the
persuasive eloquence of their chants. Think, then, with what a troubled
spirit I heard them, as we floated on between the calm stars in the
heavens and the whirling stars in the sea.

We went out to the ship's side, and little Niga was as noisy as any of
them when I pressed upon him a practical memorial of my visit; and away
he drifted into the night, with his boyish babble pitched high and
shrill; and the Present speedily became the Past, and grew old in a
moment.

Then I looked for the last time upon that faint and cloudy picture, and
seemed almost to see the spirit of the departed beckoning to me with
waving arms and imploring looks; and I longed for him with the old
longing, that will never release me from my willing bondage. I blessed
him in his new life, and I rejoiced with exceeding great joy that he was
freed at last from the tyranny of life,--released from the unsolvable
riddles of the ages. The night-wind was laden with music, and sweet with
the odors of ginger and cassia; the spume of the reef was pale as the
milk of the cocoa-nuts, and the blazing embers on shore glowed like old
sacrificial fires.

Then I heard a voice crying out of the shadow,--an ancient and eloquent
voice,--saying: "Behold my fated race! Our days are numbered. Long have
we feasted in the rich presence of a revealed deity. We sat in ashes
under the mute gods of Baal; we fled before the wrath of Moloch, the
destroyer; we were as mighty as the four winds of heaven: but the
profane hand of the Iconoclast has desecrated our temples, and humbled
our majesty in the dust. O impious breakers of idols! Why will ye put
your new wines into these old bottles, that were shaped for spring
waters only, and not for wine at all! Lo! ye have broken them, and the
wine is wasted. Be satisfied, and depart!"

So that spirit of air sang the death-song of his tribe, and the sad
music of his voice rang over the waters like a lullaby.

Then I heard no more, and I said, "My asylum is the great world; my
refuge is in oblivion"; and I turned my face seaward, never again to
dream fondly of my island home; never again to know it as I have known
it; never again to look upon its serene and melancholy beauty: for the
soul of the beloved is transmitted to the vales of rest, and his ashes
are sown in the watery furrows of the deep sea!

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

TABOO.--A FÊTE-DAY IN TAHITI.


It was on one of those vagabond pilgrimages to nowhere in particular,
such as every stranger is bound to make in a strange land, that I first
stumbled upon my royal Jester, better known in Tahiti as Taboo.

Great Jove! what a night it was! A wild ravine full of banyan and
pandanus trees, and of parasite climbers, and the thousand nameless
leafing and blossoming creatures that intermarry to such an alarming
extent in the free-loving tropics, had tempted me to pasture there for a
little while. I was wandering on among roots and trailing branches, and
under ropes upon ropes of flowers that seemed to swing suddenly across
my path on purpose to keep me from finding too easily the secret heart
of the mountain. I felt it was right that I should be made to realize
how sacred a spot that sanctuary of Nature was, but I fretted somewhat
at the persistency of those speechless sentinels who guarded its outer
door so faithfully. There was a waterfall within, that I had prayed to
see,--one of those mysterious waterfalls that descend noiselessly from
the bosom of a cloud, stealing over cushions of moss, like a ray of
light in a dream, or something else equally intangible.

You never find this sort of waterfall in the common way. No one can
exactly point it out to you; but you must search for it yourself, and
listen for its voice,--and usually listen in vain,--till, suddenly, you
come upon it in a moment, almost as if by accident; and its whole
quivering length glitters and glistens with jewels, where it hangs, like
a necklace, on the bosom of a great cliff. It is the only visible chain
that binds earth to heaven; and no wonder you gaze at it with
questioning eyes!

Well, while I was looking about me, expecting every moment to feel the
damp breath of the waterfall upon my forehead, night came down. Where
was I? In the midst of a pathless forest; between cliffs whose sleek,
mossy walls were so steep as to forbid even the goat's sharp hoof. Down
the hollow of the ravine, among round, slippery rocks, and between
trellises of giant roots, tumbled a mountain torrent. No human form
visible, probably none to be looked for on that side of the inaccessible
dome of the mountain; yet fearlessly I toiled on, knowing that food and
shelter were on every side, and that no hand, whose clasp was as fervent
as the clasp of the vine itself, would be raised against me; and, thank
Heaven! outsiders were scarce.

In the midst of the narrowing chasm, with the night thickening, and the
wood growing more and more objectionable, I heard a sound as of
stumbling feet before me. My first thought was of _color_! I would
scarcely trust a White Man in that predicament. What well-disposed White
would be prowling, like a wild animal, alone in a forest at night? It
occurred to me that I was white, or had passed as such; but I know
and have always known that, inwardly, I am purple-blooded, and
supple-limbed, and invisibly tattooed after the manner of my lost tribe!
I was startled at the sound, and slackened my pace to listen: the
footsteps paused with mine. I plunged forward, accusing the Echoes of
playing me false. Again the mysterious one rushed awkwardly on before
me, with footfalls that were not like mine, nor like any that I could
trace: they were neither brute nor human, but fell clumsily among the
roots and stones, out of time with me; therefore, no echo, and beyond my
reckoning entirely.

At this hour the moon, of a favorable size, looked over the cliff,
flooding the chasm with her soft light. I rejoiced at it, and hoped for
a revelation of the Unknown, whose tottering steps had mocked mine for
half an hour.

We were in the midst of a dense grove of breadfruit-trees. Scarcely a
ray of light penetrated their thick-woven branches; but, against the
faint light of the open distance, I marked the weird outline of one who
might once have been human, but was no longer a tolerable image of his
Maker. The figure was like the opposite halves of two men bodily joined
together in an amateur attempt at human grafting. The trunk was curved
the wrong way; a great shoulder bullied a little shoulder, and kept it
decidedly under; a long leg walked right around a short leg that was
perpetually sitting itself down on invisible seats, or swinging itself
for the mere pleasure of it. One arm clutched a ten-foot bamboo about
three inches in diameter, and wielded it as though it were a bishop's
crook, and something to be proud of; the other arm--it must have
belonged to a child when it stopped growing--was hooked up over one ear,
looking as though it had been badly wired by some medical student, and
was worn as a lasting reproach to him. A shaggy head was set on the
down-slope of the big shoulder, and seemed to be continually looking
over the little shoulder and under the little arm for some one always
expected, but who was very long in coming.

Upon this startling discovery I turned to flee, but the figure
immediately followed. It was evidently too late to escape an interview,
and, taking heart, I walked toward it, when, to my amazement, it hastily
staggered away from me, looking always over its shoulder, quickening its
pace with mine, slackening its speed with me, and keeping, or seeking to
keep, within a certain distance of me all the while. My curiosity was
excited, and, as I saw it bore me no ill-will, I made a quick plunge
forward, hoping to capture it. With an energetic effort it strove to
escape me; but, with the head turned the wrong way, it stumbled blindly
into a bit of jungle, where it lay whining piteously. I assisted it to
its feet, with what caution and tenderness I could, and, finding it
still wary, walked on slowly, leading the way to the edge of the grove,
where the moonlight was almost as radiant as the dawn. It followed me
like a dog, and was evidently grateful for my company. I walked slowly
that it might not stumble, and, as we emerged from the shadow of the
breadfruits, I manoeuvered so as to bring its face toward the moonlight,
and I saw--a hideous visage, with all its features sliding to one
corner; and nothing but the two soft, sleepy-looking eyes saved me from
yielding to the disgust that its whole presence awakened. As it was, I
involuntarily started back with a shudder, and a slight exclamation that
attracted its attention. "Taboo! Taboo!" moaned the poor creature, half
in introduction, half in apology and explanation.

He was well named the "forbidden one": set apart from all his fellows;
incapable of utterance; maimed in body; an outcast among his own people;
homeless, yet at home everywhere; friendless, though welcomed by all for
his entertaining and ludicrous simplicity; feeding, like the birds, from
Nature's lap, and, like the birds, left to the winds and waters for
companionship.

Somehow I felt that Taboo could lead me at once to the waterfall; and I
tried to seek out the small door to his brain, and impress him with my
anxiety to reach the place. O, what darkness was there, and what doubts
and fears seemed to cloud the hidden portals of his soul! He made an
uncouth noise for me. Perhaps he meant it as music: it was frightful to
hear it up there in the mountain solitudes. He got me fruits and a
little water in the palm of his hand, which he expected me to drink with
a relish. He lay down at my feet in a broken heap of limbs, crooning
complacently. He was playful and thoughtful alternately; at least, he
lost himself in long silences from time to time, while his eyes glowed
with a deep inward light, that almost made me hope to startle his reason
from its dreadful sleep; but a single word broke the spell, and set him
to laughing as though he would go all to pieces; and his joy was more
pitiful than his sorrow.

In one of his silent moods he suddenly staggered to his feet, and
shambled into a narrow trail to one side of the gorge. I wondered at his
unexpected impulse, and feared that he had grown tired of me already,
preferring the society of his feathered comrades, a few of whom sounded
their challenge-note, that soared like silver arrows in the profound
stillness of the ravine. It seemed not, however: in a few moments he
returned, and signalled me with his expressive grunt, and I followed
him. Through thickets of fern, arching high over our heads, down spongy
dells, and over rims of rock jutting from the base of the mountain,
Taboo and I clambered in the warm moonlight. Anon we came upon a
barricade of bamboos, growing like pickets set one against another. I
know not how broad the thicket might have been,--possibly as broad as
the ravine itself,--but into the thick of it Taboo edged himself; and
close upon his heels I followed. In a few moments we had crushed our way
through the midst of the bamboos, that clashed together after us so that
a bird might not have tracked us, and lo! a crystal pool in the heart of
a wonderful garden; and to it, silently, from heaven itself descended
that mysterious waterfall, whose actual existence I had seriously begun
to question. It lay close against the breast of the mountain, strangely
pale in the full glow of the moon, while, like a vein of fire, it seemed
to throb from end to end; or like a shining thread with great pearls
slipping slowly down its full length, taking the faint hues of the
rainbow as they fell, playing at prisms, until my eyes, weary of
watching, closed of their own accord. I sank down by Taboo, who was
sleeping soundly in the hollow of a great tree; and the one cover for
both of us was the impenetrable shadow that is never lifted from that
silent sanctuary of the Most High.

The sky was as saffron when we woke from our out-of-door sleep, and the
whole atmosphere was less poetical and impressive than on the night
previous. Stranger than all else, there was no visible trace of the
mysterious waterfall. I even began to question my own senses, and
thought it possible that I had been dreaming. Yet there sat Taboo in his
frightful imperfection, as happy and indifferent as possible. Of course,
he could tell me nothing of the magical waters. He had doubtless already
forgotten the episode of the hour previous. He lived for the solitary
moment, and his mind seemed unable to grasp the secrets of ten seconds
on either side of his narrow present. In fact, he was playing with
a splendid lizard when I returned from my brief and fruitless
reconnoissance; and as I came up he wondered at me, as he never ceased
to wonder, with fresh bewilderment, whenever I came back to him, after
never so brief an absence.

I soon learned to play upon Taboo's one stop; to point a finger at him,
and bore imaginary auger-holes right into him anywhere; for he always
winced and whined, like a very baby, and yielded at once to my
pantomimic suggestion. But what a wreck was here! A delicate instrument,
full of rifts and breakages, with that single key readily answerable to
the slightest touch of my will. I have often wished that it had been a
note more deep, profound, or sympathetic. It was simply merry and
shrill, and incapable of any modulation whatever. Point a finger at
him, make a few coils in the air that grow to a focus as they draw
nearer to him, and he would run over with uncontrollable jollity that
was at times a little painful in its boisterousness.

I knew well enough that I had sucked the honey from that particular cell
in the mountain, and that I might as well resume my pilgrimage. There
was to be a _Fête Napoléon_ in Papeete. We hadn't heard, up to that
hour, of the wreck of the great Empire, and, being in a loyal French
colony, it behooved us to have the very best time possible. Said I to
myself, "Taboo will find sufficient food for merriment in our mode of
_fêting_ an Emperor; therefore Taboo shall go with me to town and enjoy
himself." I suggested an immediate adjournment to Papeete with the tip
of my forefinger, whereat Taboo doubled up, as usual, and, in his own
fashion, implored me to stop being so funny. We at once started;
returning through the bamboo-brakes, fording the stream in some awkward
way, and slowly working our passage back to town.

The Tahitians have but one annual holiday. As this, however, is
seventy-two hours in length, while everything relating to it is broad in
proportion, it is about as much as they can conscientiously ask for.

Taboo and I entered the town on the eve of the first day, together with
multitudes from the neighboring districts, flocking thither in their
best clothes. The lovely bay of Papeete was covered with fleets of
canoes, hailing from all the seaside villages on the island, and many of
them from Moorea, and islands even more distant. No sea is too broad to
be compassed by an ambitious Kanack, who scents a festival from afar.

Along the crescent shores of the bay, the canoes were heaped, tier upon
tier. It was as though a whole South Sea navy had been stranded, for the
town was crowded with canoe-boys and all manner of natives, in gala
dress. The incessant rolling of drums, the piping of bamboo-flutes, and
the choruses of wandering singers began early in the dawn of the 14th
August, and were expected to continue, uninterruptedly, to the evening
of the 16th. Taboo regarded it all with singular indifference. Everybody
seemed to know him, and to take particular delight in greeting him. His
sleepy disregard of them was considered extremely laughable, and they
went their way roaring with merriment, that contrasted strongly with the
grave, listless face of the simple one, who was apparently oblivious of
everything.

The morning after we appeared in Papeete was Sunday, according to the
calendar. The little cathedral, with banana-leaves rustling in the open
windows, was thronged with worshippers of all colors, doubly devout in
the excessive heat. Various choirs relieved one another during Mass,
and some diminutive fellows, under ten years of age, chanted Latin hymns
in a pleasingly plaintive voice, led by a friar in long clothes and a
choker. Taboo crouched by the open door during service, raking the
gravel-walk with his crooked fingers, and hitching about with
indefatigable industry. After the last gospel, we all went into the
middle of the street--for there were no sidewalks--and got our boots
very dusty. Little knots of friends seemed to sit down in the way
wherever they pleased, and to talk as long as they liked; while
everybody else accommodatingly turned out for them, or paused, and
listened to the conversation, without embarrassment on either side.
Liquor was imbibed on the sly; some eyes were beginning to swim
perceptibly, and some tongues to wag faster and looser than ever. The
Admiral's flagship was one pyramid of gorgeous bunting, and his band
delighted a great audience, gathered upon the shore, with a _matinée_
gratis. At sunset the imperial batteries belched their sulphurous
thunder, that came as near to breaking the sabbath as possible. In the
evening more music, up at the Governor's garden,--waltzes, polkas, and
quadrilles, so brilliantly executed that the listeners were half mad
with delight; and you couldn't for the life of you tell what day it had
been, nor what night it was, but Sunday was positively set down against
it in the calendar. At ten P. M. a signal-gun says "Good-night" to the
citizens of Papeete, and it behooves all those who are dark-skinned to
retire instantly, on pain of arrest and a straw-heap in the calaboose.

In the midst of our Sunday festival, while yet the streets were
hilarious, slap-bang went this impudent piece of ordnance, and at once
the crowd began to disperse in the greatest confusion. Taboo, who had
been an inanimate spectator during the day's diversions, seemed to
comprehend the necessity of hasty flight to some quarter or other; and,
with a confusion of ideas peculiar to him, he began careering in great
circles through the swaying multitudes, and continued to revolve around
an uncertain centre, until I seized him and sought to pilot him to some
convenient place of shelter. I thought of the great market, that, like
those ancient cities of refuge, was always open to the benighted
wanderer; and thither we hastened. A lofty roof, covering a good part of
a block, kept the rain from a vast enclosure, stored with stalls,
tables, and benches. It was simply shelter of the barest kind, but
sufficient for all needs in that charitable climate. There was a buzzing
of turbulent throngs as we edged our way toward the centre of the
market-place; you would think that all the bees of Tahiti were swarming
in unison, from the noise thereof. The commotion was long in quieting.
It had to subside like the sea at flood-tide. Every little while a brace
of _gendarmes_ strutted past the premises, feeling mighty fine in their
broad white pants, like a ship with studding-sails out, and with those
comical bobtails sprouting out of the small of their backs. I know that
Taboo and I, having laid ourselves on somebody's counter, listened and
nudged each other for two or three hours, and that it began to feel like
morning before there was sleep enough to go entirely around the
establishment.

The man who is the first to wake in Papeete lights his lamp and goes to
market. As soon as he makes his untimely appearance, the community
begins to stir; a great clatter of drowsy voices and dozens of yawns are
the symptoms of returning day; and in ten minutes the market is declared
open, though it is still deep and tranquil starlight overhead, with not
a trace of dawn as yet visible.

When the market opens before 3 A. M.--and the hour happens to be the
blackest of the four-and-twenty--it is highly inconvenient for any
foreigner and his royal jester who may be surreptitiously passing the
night upon one of the fruit counters, but there is no help for them:
sleepy heads give way to fresh-gathered bread-fruits and nets of
fragrant oranges; bananas are swung up within tempting reach of
everybody; all sorts of natives come in from the four quarters of the
Papeetean globe, with back-loads of miscellaneous viands, a mat under
one arm, and a flaming torch in hand. Rows upon rows of girls sell
fruits and flowers to the highest bidder; withering old women haggle
over the prices of their perfumed and juicy wares; solitary men offer
their solitary strings of fish for a _real_ each, and refuse to be
beaten down by any wretch of a fellow who dares to insinuate that the
fish are a trifle too scaly; boys sit demurely over their meagre array
of temptations in the shape of six tomatoes, three eggs, a dozen or so
of guavas, and one cucumber. These youngsters usually sit with a
passionless countenance that forbids any hope of a bargain at reduced
prices, and they pass an hour or two with scarce a suggestion of custom;
but it is suddenly discovered that they have something desirable, and a
dozen purchasers begin quarrelling for it, during which time some one
else quietly makes his purchase from one corner of the boy's mat; and,
having closed out his stock in less than ten minutes, he quietly pockets
his _reales_, and departs without having uttered a syllable.

Taboo and I went from one mat to another, eying the good things for
breakfast. I offered him the best that the market afforded; and I could
easily do so, for in no land is the article cheaper or better. Taboo,
having made the circuit of the entire establishment, upon mature
deliberation concluded to take nothing. At every point he was greeted
uproariously by the noisy and good-natured people, who were willing to
give him anything he might choose to take. They, probably, felt that it
was worth more than the price of the article to see the sublime scorn on
the poor fellow's face as he declined their limes, _feis_, mangoes, or
whatever delicious morsel it might have been. As for me, I couldn't
resist those seductions. I made my little purchases and withdrew to the
seaside, where I could break my fast by sunrise, and enjoy comparative
quiet. Taboo grinned in the market-place till he was weary of the
applause showered upon him by the ungodly, who made light of his
irreparable misfortune and took pleasure in his misery. He hunted me up,
or, rather, stumbled upon me again, and stayed by me, amusing himself
with pelting the fish that sported, like sunbeams and prisms, in the sea
close at our feet.

It was _fête_-day in Tahiti. I sat, at sunrise, by the tideless margin
of a South Sea lagoon, bristling with coral and glittering with gem-like
fish; in either hand I held a mango and banana. I raised the mango to my
lips. What a marvel it was! A plump vegetable egg, full of delusion, and
stuffed with a horny seed nearly as large as itself. It had a fragrance
as of oils and sirups; it purged sweet-scented and resinous gums. Its
hide was, perhaps, too tough for convenience, but its inner lusciousness
tempted me to persevere in the consumption of it. With much difficulty I
broke the skin. Honey of Hymettus! It seemed as though the very marrow
of the tropics were about to intoxicate my palate. Alas, for the hopes
of youthful inexperience! What was so fair to see proved but a meagre
mouthful of saturated wool; that colossal and horny seed asserted itself
everywhere. The more I strove to handle it with caution, the more
slippery and unmanageable it became. It shot into my beard, it leaped
lightly into my shirt-bosom, and skated over the palms of both hands.
Small rivulets of liquor trickled down my sleeves, making disagreeable
puddles at both elbows. My fingers were webbed together in a glutinous
mass. My whole front was in a shocking state of smear. My teeth grew
weary of combing out the beguiling threads of the fruit. The thing
seemed, to my imagination, a small, flat head, covered with short, blond
hair, profusely saturated with some sweet sort of ointment, that I had
despaired of feasting on; and I was not sorry when the slippery stone
sprang out of my grasp, and peppered itself with sea-sand.

I knew that there still remained to me a morsel that was of itself fit
food for the gods. I poised aloft, with satisfaction, the rare-ripe
banana, beautiful to the eye as a nugget of purest gold. The pliant
petals were pouting at the top of the fruit. I readily turned them back,
forming an unique and convenient gilded salver for the column of flaky
manna that was, as yet, swathed in lace like folds. These gauzy ribbons
fell from it almost of their own accord, and hung in fleecy festoons
about it.

Here was a repast of singularly appropriate mould, being about the size
of a respectable mouth, and containing just enough mouthfuls to
temporarily satisfy the appetite. Not a morsel of it but was full of
mellowness, and sweet flavor, and fragrance. Not an atom of it was
wasted; for, no sooner had I thrown aside the cool, clean, flesh-like
case, than it was made way with by a fowl, that had, no doubt, been
patiently awaiting that abundant feast.

Mangoes and bananas! Their very names smack of shady gardens, that know
no harsher premonition of death than the indolent and natural decay of
all things. The nostril is excited with the thought of them; the palate
grows moist and yearns for them; and the soul feasts itself, for a
moment, with a memory of mangoes and bananas past, whose perfection was
but another proof of immortality, since it is impossible ever to forget
them individually. Mangoes and bananas! the prime favorites at Nature's
most bountiful board; the realization of a dream of the orchards of the
Hesperides; alike excellent, yet so vastly dissimilar in their
excellences, it seems almost incredible that the same beneficent
Providence can have created the two fruits!

It was the memorable 15th of August, 1870; but I have reason to believe
the bananas were no better on that particular occasion than almost
always in their own latitude. The 15th of August, --where was the
Emperor then? I forget; I know that we rejoiced in the blissful
confidence that we were to have a grand time at all hazards. There were
guns at sunrise from ship and shore; a grand national procession of
French and Tahitians to High Mass at 10.30; guns--twenty-one of
them--together with the ringing of bells, and a salute of flags, at the
elevation of the Host, so that you would have known the supreme moment
had you been miles away. Then came a sumptuous public breakfast for the
Frenchmen; and for the natives, games of several sorts.

Taboo and I, having properly observed the more solemn ceremonials of the
day, gave ourselves up to the full enjoyment of these latter diversions.
There was a greased pole, with shining cups; and flowing prints, both
useful and ornamental, hung at the top of it. Several naked and superbly
built fellows shinned up it with infinite difficulty, and were so
fatigued when they got there, they were only too willing to clutch the
first article within reach, which was, of course, the least desirable,
and scarcely worth the trouble of getting. O, such magnificent grouping
at the foot of the pole, as the athletes shouldered one another in a
sort of co-operative experiment at getting up sooner; such struggles to
rise a little above the heads of the impatient climbers beneath as made
the aspiring Kanack quite pale,--that is, greenish yellow; such losing
of grips, and fainting of hearts, and slidings back to earth in the
midst of taunts and jeers, but all in the best of humors and the hottest
of suns! such novelties as these were a very great delight to Taboo and
myself. He, however, didn't deign to laugh heartily: he merely smiled in
a superior manner that seemed to imply that he knew of something that
was twice as much fun and not half the trouble, but he didn't choose to
disclose it. He nearly always seemed to know as much as any ten of us;
and it was like an assumption of innocence, that queer, vacant
expression of his face. I'm not sure that he was not possessed of some
rare instinct beyond our comprehension, which was to him an abundant
compensation for the fragmentary body he was obliged to trundle about.

Early in the afternoon, there were fresh arrivals in the bay: two
mammoth double war-canoes, of fifty paddles each, came in from a remote
sea-district; they were the very sort of water-monsters that went out to
greet my illustrious predecessor, Captain Cook, nearly a century ago.
Taboo and I were only too glad to sit meekly among the ten thousand
spectators that blackened the great sweep of the shore, while these
savages matched their prowess. With one vigorous plunge of the paddles
the canoes sprang from the beach into the watery arena. How strange they
looked! Long, low sides, scarce eight inches above water, and stained
like fish-scales; big, yawning jaws in their snakelike heads, and the
tail of a dragon in their wakes; every man of the hundred stripped to
the skin and bareheaded; their brawny bodies glistening in the sun as
though they had been oiled, while, with mechanical accuracy, the crews
beat the water with their paddles, and chanted their guttural chants,
with the sea flashing and foaming under them. The race was a tie;
perhaps it was fortunate that it proved so. I fear if one crew had
beaten the other crew the breadth of a paddle, that other would have
lain to and eaten that one right under our very eyes. They had their
songs of triumph, both sounding the chorus, during which they drummed
with their paddles on the sides of their canoes, till the frail things
shivered and groaned in genuine misery. Then they renewed the race,
because they couldn't possibly be still for a moment; and they looked
like a brace of mastodon-centipedes trying to get out of the water, with
death hissing in their throats.

The evening of the great day was drawing to a close. Taboo and I again
went out into the narrow, green lanes of Papeete, seeking what we might
devour with all our eyes and ears. They were very charming, those long
arbors of densely leaved trees, with little tropical vignettes set in
the farther end of them. It was almost like getting a squint through the
wrong end of a telescope, pointed toward some fairy-land or other. As it
grew dark, a thousand ready hands began illuminating the avenues that
lead to the Governor's house. Up and down its deep veranda swung ropes
of lanterns; and as the guards at the garden-gate presented arms at the
approach of the Admiral, or some distinguished and decorated foreigner,
the strains of Strauss, deliciously played, filled the illuminated grove
with an air of romance that was very Oriental in its mellowness, and
quickened every foot that was so happy as to touch the soil of Tahiti in
so fortunate an hour. On every part of the public lawns the revels were
conducted after the native fashion. Bands of singers and dancers sang
and danced in the streets, and were frequently rewarded with liberal
potations. Taboo looked on as amiably as usual, and for some time as
passively also; but there was something intoxicating in the air, and it
began to have a visible effect upon him. It was not long before he
strove to emulate the singers. St. Cecilia! what a song was his! I could
scarcely endure to hear that royal Jester striving to tune his
inharmonious voice to the glib, though monotonous Tahitian madrigals. I
walked away by myself, or rather went into another part of the village,
and sought a change of scene; for there was no seclusion to be hoped for
on a _fête_-night.

From the Governor's halls came the entrancing harmony of flutes and
harps; from every lane and alley the piping of nose-fifes and the
droning of nasal chorals; from the sea rolled in the deep, hoarse
booming of the reef, the rhythmical plash of oars, or the clear,
prolonged cry of some one in the watery distance hailing some one close
at hand. Even so savage and picturesque a spectacle as this grew
wearisome after a time, and I turned my steps toward a place of shelter,
and suggested to myself sleep.

In one lane was a throng of natives, wilder in their demonstrations of
joy than all the others. My curiosity was excited, and I hastened to
join them. Having with some difficulty wedged my way into the front row
of spectators, I beheld the subject of their riotous applause. In the
centre of a small ring was an ungainly figure, writhing in grotesque
contortions; tom-toms were being beaten with diabolical energy and
wildness; flutes and shrill voices were chiming in rapid and bewildering
chromatics; the audience--the half-crazed and utterly inhuman
audience--gloated over the shocking spectacle with devilish delight. In
one moment I comprehended all: Taboo, overcome by the general and
unusual excitement, had succumbed to its depraving influences; and,
unable longer to control himself, he was broadly burlesquing, in his
helplessness, one of the national dances. Music had at last reached his
impenetrable soul, awakened his long-slumbering sympathies, and found
him her willing slave. A pity that some diviner strain had not first led
him captive, that he might have been spared this disgrace!

I saw his unhappy body ambling to the shame of all. I saw those pitiful,
unshapen shoulders undulating in vain attempts at passional expression;
the helpless arm waving at every movement of the body, while the
withered hand spun like a whirligig above his ears; his eyes, having
lost their accustomed mild light, stared distractedly about, seeking
rescue and protection, as I thought. In a few moments I attracted his
notice, though he seemed but partly to recognize me. There was his usual
uncertain recognition grown more doubtful,--nay, even hopeless,--as his
face betrayed. Again I caught his eye: I felt that but one course was
left me, and at once I aimed my finger at him. He winced in his
delirious dance. I coiled it round and round, weaving airy circle within
circle; quicker and quicker I wove my spell, and at last shot the whole
hand at him, as though I would run him through. He doubled, like one
struck with a fatal blow, and went to the ground all of a senseless
heap. There was a disturbance in the audience. Some of them thought I
had bewitched Taboo; and it behooved me to go at once, rather than seek
to make explanation of the singular result of my presence there. I went,
and spent a dull night, accusing myself of being the possible spiritual
murderer of Taboo. I had no business to bring him to the metropolis at
that unfortunate season; I had no right to leave him with his traducers:
and that was the whole statement of the case.

The last day of the _fête_ was, of course, less joyous to me. A score of
nameless nags were to be ridden by light weights in breech-cloths; and I
sought consolation in the prospect of seeing some bewitching
horsemanship. The track, in use but once every twelvemonth, and yielding
annually a young orchard of guava-trees, presented to the astonished
gaze of the foreign sporting-gentleman who happened to be on the
ground--if, indeed, there was such a one present--a half-mile course,
with numerous stones and hollows relieving its surface, while the rope
that enclosed it kept giving way every few moments, letting in a mixed
multitude among the half-broken horses.

The Queen was present at the races,--Pomare, whose life has been one
long, sorrowful romance; the Admiral was also there; and many a petty
officer, with abundant gilt and tinsel. At a signal from the trumpeter
the horses were entered unannounced, and everybody betted wildly. One
little African jockey, mounted upon the cleverest piece of flesh and
blood in the field, called for the larger stakes; and he would certainly
have won, but for an unavoidable accident: the little African was
pressing in on the home-stretch, and everything looked lovely for the
winning mare, when, unluckily, she put her nigh leg in a crab-hole, and
snapped her shin-bone square off. The undaunted little African tried his
best to finish the heat on his own responsibility, and went off into the
air in fine style, but missed his calculation, and burrowed about three
lengths from the goal. His neck was driven in nearly up to the ears, and
the mare had to be shot; but the races went mercilessly on until a
tremendous thunder-storm flooded the track and washed the population
back to town. Dance after dance consumed the afternoon hours; and song
upon song, eternally reiterated, finally failed to create any special
enthusiasm.

I saw no further traces of Taboo. Again and again I followed knots of
the curious into the larger native houses, where the lascivious dances
were given with the utmost _abandon_; thither--I suspected--Taboo would
most likely be impelled, for the music was wilder and the applause more
boisterous and unrestrained.

The evening of the last day of the _fête_ was darkening; most people
were growing a little weary of the long-drawn festivities; many had
succumbed to their fatigue, and slept by the wayside, or, it may be,
they had known too well the nature of the Tahitian juices, such as no
man may drink and not fall!

The palace of Pomare--a great, hollow, incomplete shell, whose windows
have never been glazed, and whose doors have never been hung--was the
scene of the concluding ceremonials of the season. The long verandas
were thickly hung with numberless paper-lanterns, swinging continually
in the soft night-winds that stole down from the star-lit slopes of
Fautahua; the broad lawns in front of the palace were blocked out in
squares, like the map of a liliputian city. Each one of these plats was
set apart for a band of singers, and there were as many bands as
districts in Tahiti and Moorea, together with delegations from islands
more remote. Soon the choruses began to assemble. Choirs of fifty voices
each, male and female, led by tight-headed drums and screaming fifes,
drew toward the palace-gardens, and were formally admitted by the proper
authorities, who were very much swollen with the pomp of office and,
perhaps, a little sprinkle of the exhilarating accompaniments of the
season. One after another the white-robed processions approached,--each
fresh arrival looking more like the chorus in "Norma" than the last,
though it then seemed impossible that any Druid could presume to appear
more gracefully ghostlike. Each singer wore a plume of cocoa-leaves,
whose feathers were more lovely than the downy wands of the ostrich.
They were made of knots of long, slender ribbons, softer than satin,
veined like clouded silver, as transparent as the clearest isinglass,
and as delicate as the airiest gauze.

Out of the core of the palm-tree, in the midst of its rich, dark mass of
foliage, springs a tuft of leaves as tender as the first sprouts of a
lily-bulb. These budding leaves are carefully removed, split edgewise,
and the enamelled sheets laid open to the sun; then, with the
thumb-nail, passed skilfully over the inner surface, a filmy membrane is
separated, and spread in the air to dry. A single tree yields but a
small cluster of these pale, cloud-like leaves, scarcely a handful in
all, yet the tree withers when they pluck the heart of it. It is the
very soul of the Southern palm, with every leaf spiritualized, and
looking vapory as tangible moonlight.

The leader of the concert having challenged the choruses from the
veranda of the palace, at once twenty choirs struck into their
particular anthem with the utmost zeal. A discord about six acres in
extent was the result. It seemed as though each choir was seeking whom
it might drown out with superior vocal compass and volume. With much
difficulty the several bands of singers were persuaded to await their
turn for a _solo_ effort that might be listened to with no small degree
of pleasure. From time to time, during the entire evening, some
obstreperous chorus would break loose, spite of every precaution; and it
had always to sing itself out before order could be restored. Taboo
would have thoroughly enjoyed those two thousand singers, each singing
his or her favorite roundelay, independent of all laws of time and
melody. He might have been there, as it was, offering his inharmonious
chant with the mob of contestants.

By the time the series of prize-songs had been sung, the sky grew
cloudy, and the torches began to flicker in the increasing wind; a few
great drops of rain spat down in the midst of the singers, and the reef
moaned loudly, like the baying of signal-guns. It was ominous of coming
storms. At the climax of a choral revolution, in which every man's voice
seemed raised against his neighbor's, a roar as of approaching armies
was heard, mingled with the accompanying crash of artillery. A sudden
puff of wind extinguished the major part of the torches, and wrecked
many of the lanterns in the palace porch. It was simply a tropical
shower in all its magnificence; but it was enough! The _fête_ concluded
then and there, in the promptest manner. The narrow streets of Papeete
were clogged with retreating hosts, who continually shouted a sort of
general adieu to everybody, as they gathered their skirts about them,
and, with shoes in hand, turned their bare feet homeward.

Since the end had at last come, and I had no further claims upon the
people, nor the people upon me,--if, indeed, either of us were ever
anything in particular to one another,--I drifted with the majority, and
soon found myself in the suburban wilderness that girdles the small
capital of the queendom. I wandered on till the noise of the revellers
grew more and more indistinct. They were scattering themselves over the
length and breadth of the island, carrying their songs with them. Now
and then a fresh gust of wind bore down to me an echo of a refrain that
had grown familiar during the days of the _fête_, and will not soon be
forgotten; but the past was rapidly fading, and the necessities of the
future began to present themselves with unusual boldness. Instinctively
I turned into the winding trail that once before had led me toward that
mysterious mountain sacristy, over whose font fell the spiritual and
dreamlike rivulet whose baptismal virtues Taboo and I had sought
together. I felt certain that I could find it without guidance; for the
broken clouds let slip such floods of moonlight as made day of darkness,
and rendered the smallest landmark easily distinguishable.

I paused for rest in the breadfruit grove where first I met with
my weird companion. Presently I resumed my pilgrimage, wending my
way toward the slender path that led through fern, forest, and
bamboo-jungle, to the crystal lake and waterfall. In vain I sought it;
the slightest traces of the trail seemed obliterated. I wandered up and
down the winding way, till I was in despair of finding the slightest
clew to the mystery. I sat down and thought how a slight accident of
forgetfulness was lending a sense of enchantment to the whole valley,
when I heard a stumbling step, too marked to be soon forgotten. I crept
into a shadow, and awaited the approach of the solitary wanderer. How he
tottered as he drew near! He seemed to have lost part of his small skill
since I last saw him. He was laughing quietly to himself while he
journeyed: perhaps some memory of the _fête_ still pleased him. He
passed me, unconscious of my presence. I ran cautiously, and followed
him at a safe distance. We threaded the old path, by stream and cliff
and brake, and, after a little, reached the secluded and silent borders
of the lake. Once or twice he had heard me as I brushed past the bamboos
or a twig snapped under foot, but those forest-sounds scarcely
disconcerted him; he was too well used to them. He paused at the margin
of the lake, stooped awkwardly and drank of it, went a little to one
side where an outlet fed the torrent we had forded some distance down
the valley, and there he bathed. Having started once or twice, as though
with some remembered and definite purpose, he paused a moment or two,
looked about him helplessly, and returned to the foot of the great tree
where we slept the first night of our acquaintance.

There was a faint suggestion of the fall across the sombre breast of the
cliff opposite, but whether it were real or a delusion, I could scarcely
determine. Taboo was soon asleep among the roots of the banyan; and I,
weary of seeking some revelation of the island mysteries, lay down near
him, and gradually sank into unconsciousness. Once in the night I awoke:
the clouds had blown over, and the moon was more resplendent than I ever
remember to have seen it. Out on the mossy rim of the lake stood Taboo,
gazing wistfully upon the mountains. Instinctively my eyes followed his,
and there I beheld the waterfall in all its glory, leaping, like a ray
of light, from the bosom of the sky. I could scarcely determine whether
or no it really fell into the lake, for the foliage about its shores was
too profuse. It flashed like handfuls of diamond-dust thrown into the
light, and descended as noiselessly and airily as vapor.

The clouds soon gathered again. I slept, overcome with weariness; and
when I awoke at dawn, Taboo was missing, as well as all traces of the
fall. This, however, scarcely surprised me, for I had grown to look upon
it as some lunar effect that came and went with the increasing or
decreasing splendor of the moon; or it might have been the short-lived
offspring of the showers that sweep over the island at uncertain
intervals. It was probably the only dramatic result to be looked for in
the career of Taboo. You never can depend upon one of those veering
minds, whose north-star has burned out in oblivion. I believe it was his
destiny to disappear with that rainbow, and, perhaps, return with it
when the fall should noiselessly steal down the mountain once more.

He may have had an object in secreting himself for a season; perhaps he
was renewing his youthful innocence in some more solitary spot. He may
have gone apart to laugh by the hour at the folly of the foreigners who
_fête_ a disgraced emperor; or was he making his queer noises to hear
the queerer echoes that came back to him, and all the while caring no
more for life or death than a parrot or a magpie, or even a poor,
half-shapen soul,--one of those sacred idiots that have found
worshippers before now, and never yet failed to awaken a chord of
sympathy in the heart that is fashioned after the Divine pattern of the
Son of God?

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

JOE OF LAHAINA.


I.

I was stormed in at Lahaina. Now, Lahaina is a little slice of
civilization, beached on the shore of barbarism. One can easily stand
that little of it, for brown and brawny heathendom becomes more
wonderful and captivating by contrast. So I was glad of dear, drowsy,
little Lahaina; and was glad, also, that she had but one broad street,
which possibly led to destruction, and yet looked lovely in the
distance. It didn't matter to me that the one broad street had but one
side to it; for the sea lapped over the sloping sands on its lower edge,
and the sun used to set right in the face of every solitary citizen of
Lahaina, just as he went to supper.

I was waiting to catch a passage in a passing schooner, and that's why I
came there; but the schooner flashed by us in a great gale from the
south, and so I was stormed in indefinitely.

It was Holy Week, and I concluded to go to housekeeping, because it
would be so nice to have my frugal meals in private, to go to mass and
vespers daily, and then to come back and feel quite at home. My villa
was suburban,--built of dried grasses on the model of a haystack, dug
out in the middle, with doors and windows let into the four sides
thereof. It was planted in the midst of a vineyard, with avenues
stretching in all directions, under a network of stems and tendrils.

    "Her breath is sweeter than the sweet winds
    That breathe over the grape-blossoms of Lahaina."

So the song said; and I began to think upon the surpassing sweetness of
that breath, as I inhaled the sweet winds of Lahaina, while the
wilderness of its vineyards blossomed like the rose. I used to sit in my
veranda and turn to Joe (Joe was my private and confidential servant),
and I would say to Joe, while we scented the odor of grape, and saw the
great banana-leaves waving their cambric sails, and heard the sea
moaning in the melancholy distance,--I would say to him, "Joe,
housekeeping _is_ good fun, isn't it?" Whereupon Joe would utter a sort
of unanimous Yes, with his whole body and soul; so that question was
carried triumphantly, and we would relapse into a comfortable silence,
while the voices of the wily singers down on the city front would
whisper to us, and cause us to wonder what they could possibly be doing
at that moment in the broad way that led to destruction. Then we would
take a drink of cocoa-milk, and finish our bananas, and go to bed,
because we had nothing else to do.

This is the way that we began our co-operative housekeeping: One night,
when there was a riotous sort of a festival off in a retired valley, I
saw, in the excited throng of natives who were going mad over their
national dance, a young face that seemed to embody a whole tropical
romance. On another night, when a lot of us were bathing in the
moonlight, I saw a figure so fresh and joyous that I began to realize
how the old Greeks could worship mere physical beauty and forget its
higher forms. Then I discovered that face on this body,--a rare enough
combination,--and the whole constituted Joe, a young scapegrace who was
schooling at Lahaina, under the eye--not a very sharp one--of his uncle.
When I got stormed in, and resolved on housekeeping for a season, I took
Joe, bribing his uncle to keep the peace, which he promised to do,
provided I gave bonds for Joe's irreproachable conduct while with me. I
willingly gave bonds--verbal ones--for this was just what I wanted of
Joe: namely, to instil into his youthful mind those counsels which, if
rigorously followed, must result in his becoming a true and unterrified
American. This compact settled, Joe took up his bed,--a roll of
mats,--and down we marched to my villa, and began housekeeping in good
earnest.

We soon got settled, and began to enjoy life, though we were not
without occasional domestic infelicities. For instance, Joe would wake
up in the middle of the night, declaring to me that it _was_ morning,
and thereupon insist upon sweeping out at once, and in the most vigorous
manner. Having filled the air with dust, he would rush off to the
baker's for our hot rolls and a pat of breakfast butter, leaving me,
meantime, to recover as I might. Having settled myself for a comfortable
hour's reading, bolstered up in a luxurious fashion, Joe would enter
with breakfast, and orders to the effect that it be eaten at once and
without delay. It was useless for me to remonstrate with him: he was
tyrannical.

He got me into all sorts of trouble. It was Holy Week, and I had
resolved upon going to mass and vespers daily. I went. The soft
night-winds floated in through the latticed windows of the chapel, and
made the candles flicker upon the altar. The little throng of natives
bowed in the impressive silence, and were deeply moved. It was rest for
the soul to be there; yet, in the midst of it, while the Father, with
his pale, sad face, gave his instructions, to which we listened as
attentively as possible,--for there was something in his manner and his
voice that made us better creatures,--while we listened, in the midst of
it I heard a shrill little whistle, a sort of chirp, that I knew
perfectly well. It was Joe, sitting on a cocoa-stump in the garden
adjoining, and beseeching me to come out, right off. When service was
over, I remonstrated with him for his irreverence. "Joe," I said, "if
you have no respect for religion yourself, respect those who are more
fortunate than you." But Joe was dressed in his best, and quite wild at
the entrancing loveliness of the night. "Let's walk a little," said Joe,
covered with fragrant wreaths, and redolent of cocoanut-oil. What could
I do? If I had tried to do anything to the contrary, he might have taken
me and thrown me away somewhere into a well, or a jungle, and then I
could no longer hope to touch the chord of remorse,--which chord I
sought vainly, and which I have since concluded was not in Joe's
physical corporation at all. So we walked a little. In vain I strove to
break Joe of the shocking habit of whistling me out of vespers. He would
persist in doing it. Moreover, during the day he would collect crusts of
bread and banana-skins, station himself in ambush behind the curtain of
the window next the lane, and, as some solitary creature strode solemnly
past, Joe would discharge a volley of ammunition over him, and then
laugh immoderately at his indignation and surprise. Joe was my pet
elephant, and I was obliged to play with him very cautiously.

One morning he disappeared. I was without the consolations of a
breakfast, even. I made my toilet, went to my portmanteau for my
purse,--for I had decided upon a visit to the baker,--when lo! part of
my slender means had mysteriously disappeared. Joe was gone, and the
money also. All day I thought about it. In the morning, after a very
long and miserable night, I woke up, and when I opened my eyes, there,
in the doorway, stood Joe, in a brand-new suit of clothes, including
boots and hat. He was gorgeous beyond description, and seemed overjoyed
to see me, and as merry as though nothing unusual had happened. I was
quite startled at this apparition. "Joseph!" I said in my severest tone,
and then turned over and looked away from him. Joe evaded the subject in
the most delicate manner, and was never so interesting as at that
moment. He sang his specialties, and played clumsily upon his bamboo
flute,--to soothe me, I suppose,--and wanted me to eat a whole flat pie
which he had brought home as a peace-offering, buttoned tightly under
his jacket. I saw I must strike at once, if I struck at all; so I said,
"Joe, what on earth did you do with that money?" Joe said he had
replenished his wardrobe, and bought the flat pie especially for me.
"Joseph," I said, with great dignity, "do you know that you have been
stealing, and that it is highly sinful to steal, and may result in
something unpleasant in the world to come?" Joe said, "Yes," pleasantly,
though I hardly think he meant it; and then he added, mildly, "that he
couldn't lie,"--which was a glaring falsehood,--"but wanted me to be
sure that he took the money, and so had come back to tell me."

"Joseph," I said, "you remind me of our noble Washington"; and, to my
amazement, Joe was mortified. He didn't, of course, know who Washington
was, but he suspected that I was ridiculing him. He came to the bed and
haughtily insisted upon my taking the little change he had received from
his costumers, but I implored him to keep it, as I had no use at all for
it, and, as I assured him, I much preferred hearing it jingle in his
pocket.

The next day I sailed out of Lahaina, and Joe came to the beach with his
new trousers tucked into his new boots, while he waved his new hat
violently in a final adieu, much to the envy and admiration of a score
of hatless urchins, who looked upon Joe as the glass of fashion, and but
little lower than the angels. When I entered the boat to set sail, a
tear stood in Joe's bright eye, and I think he was really sorry to part
with me; and I don't wonder at it, because our housekeeping experiences
were new to him,--and, I may add, not unprofitable.


II.

Some months of mellow and beautiful weather found me wandering here and
there among the islands, when the gales came on again, and I was driven
about homeless, and sometimes friendless, until, by and by, I heard of
an opportunity to visit Molokai,--an island seldom visited by the
tourist,--where, perhaps, I could get a close view of a singularly sad
and interesting colony of lepers.

The whole island is green, but lonely. As you ride over its excellent
turnpike, you see the ruins of a nation that is passing, like a shadow,
out of sight. Deserted garden-patches, crumbling walls, and roofs
tumbled into the one state-chamber of the house, while knots of long
grass wave at halfmast in the chinks and crannies. A land of great
traditions, of magic, and witchcraft, and spirits. A fertile and
fragrant solitude. How I enjoyed it; and yet how it was all telling upon
me, in its own way! One cannot help feeling sad there, for he seems to
be living and moving in a long revery, out of which he dreads to awaken
to a less pathetic life. I rode a day or two among the solemn and
reproachful ruins with inexpressible complacence, and, having finally
climbed a series of verdant and downy hills, and ridden for twenty
minutes in a brisk shower, came suddenly upon the brink of a great
precipice, three thousand feet in the air. My horse instinctively braced
himself, and I nervously jerked the bridle square up to my breastbone,
as I found we were poised between heaven and earth, upon a trembling
pinnacle of rock. A broad peninsula was stretched below me, covered
with grassy hills; here and there clusters of brown huts were visible,
and to the right, the white dots of houses to which I was hastening, for
that was the leper village. To that spot were the wandering and
afflicted tribes brought home to die. Once descending the narrow stairs
in the cliff under me, never again could they hope to strike their tents
and resume their pilgrimage; for the curse was on them, and necessity
had narrowed down their sphere of action to this compass,--a solitary
slope between sea and land, with the invisible sentinels of Fear and
Fate forever watching its borders.

I seemed to be looking into a fiery furnace, wherein walked the living
bodies of those whom Death had already set his seal upon. What a mockery
it seemed to be climbing down that crag,--through wreaths of vine, and
under leafy cataracts breaking into a foam of blossoms a thousand feet
below me; swinging aside the hanging parasites that obstructed the
narrow way,--entering the valley of death, and the very mouth of hell,
by these floral avenues!

A brisk ride of a couple of miles across the breadth of the peninsula
brought me to the gate of the keeper of the settlement, and there I
dismounted, and hastened into the house, to be rid of the curious crowd
that had gathered to receive me. The little cottage was very
comfortable, my host and hostess friends of precious memory; and with
them I felt at once at home, and began the new life that every one
begins when the earth seems to have been suddenly transformed into some
better or worse world, and he alone survives the transformation.

Have you never had such an experience? Then go into the midst of a
community of lepers; have ever before your eyes their Gorgon-like faces;
see the horrors, hardly to be recognized as human, that grope about you;
listen in vain for the voices that have been hushed forever by decay;
breathe the tainted atmosphere; and bear ever in mind that, while they
hover about you,--forbidden to touch you, yet longing to clasp once more
a hand that is perfect and pure,--the insidious seeds of the malady may
be generating in your vitals, and your heart, even then, be drunk with
death!

I might as well confess that I slept indifferently the first night; that
I was not entirely free from nervousness the next day, as I passed
through the various wards assigned to patients in every stage of
decomposition. But I recovered myself in time to observe the admirable
system adopted by the Hawaiian government for the protection of its
unfortunate people. I used to sit by the window and see the processions
of the less afflicted come for little measures of milk, morning and
evening. Then there was a continuous raid upon the ointment-pot, with
the contents of which they delighted to anoint themselves. Trifling
disturbances sometimes brought the plaintiff and defendant to the front
gate, for final judgment at the hands of their beloved keeper. And it
was a constant entertainment to watch the progress of events in that
singular little world of doomed spirits. They were not unhappy. I used
to hear them singing every evening: their souls were singing while their
bodies were falling rapidly to dust. They continued to play their games,
as well as they could play them with the loss of a finger-joint or a
toe, from week to week: it is thus gradually and thus slowly that they
died, feeling their voices growing fainter and their strength less, as
the idle days passed over them and swept them to the tomb.

Sitting at the window on the second evening, as the patients came up for
milk, I observed one of them watching me intently, and apparently trying
to make me understand something or other, but what that something was I
could not guess. He rushed to the keeper and talked excitedly with him
for a moment, and then withdrew to one side of the gate and waited till
the others were served with their milk, still watching me all the while.
Then the keeper entered and told me how I had a friend out there who
wished to speak with me,--some one who had seen me somewhere, he
supposed, but whom I would hardly remember. It was their way never to
forget a face they had once become familiar with. Out I went. There was
a face I could not have recognized as anything friendly or human. Knots
of flesh stood out upon it; scar upon scar disfigured it. The expression
was like that of a mummy, stony and withered. The outlines of a youthful
figure were preserved, but the hands and feet were pitiful to look at.
What was this ogre that knew me and loved me still?

He soon told me who he had once been, but was no longer. Our little,
unfortunate "Joe," my Lahaina charge. In his case the disease had spread
with fearful rapidity: the keeper thought he could hardly survive the
year. Many linger year after year, and cannot die; but Joe was more
fortunate. His life had been brief and passionate, and death was now
hastening him to his dissolution.

Joe was forbidden to come near me, so he crouched down by the fence, and
pressing his hands between the pickets sifted the dust at my feet, while
he wailed in a low voice, and called me, over and over, "dear friend,"
"good friend," and "master." I wish I had never seen him so humbled. To
think of my disreputable little _protégé_, who was wont to lord it over
me as though he had been a born chief,--to think of Joe as being there
in his extremity, grovelling in the dust at my feet; forbidden to climb
the great wall of flowers that towered between him and his beautiful
world, while the rough sea lashed the coast about him, and his only
companions were such hideous foes as would frighten one out of a dream!

How I wanted to get close to him! but I dared not; so we sat there with
the slats of the fence between us, while we talked very long in the
twilight; and I was glad when it grew so dark that I could no longer see
his face,--his terrible face, that came to kill the memory of his former
beauty.

And Joe wondered whether I still remembered how we used to walk in the
night, and go home, at last, to our little house when Lahaina was as
still as death, and you could almost hear the great stars throbbing in
the clear sky! How well I remembered it, and the day when we went a long
way down the beach, and, looking back, saw a wide curve of the land
cutting the sea like a sickle, and turning up a white and shining swath!
Then, in another place, a grove of cocoa-palms and a melancholy,
monastic-looking building, with splendid palm-branches in its broad
windows; for it was just after Palm Sunday, and the building belonged to
a Sisterhood. And I remembered how the clouds fell and the rain drove us
into a sudden shelter, and we ate tamarind-jam, spread thick on thin
slices of bread, and were supremely happy. In this connection, I could
not forget how Joe became very unruly about that time, and I got
mortified, and found great difficulty in getting him home at all; and
yet the memory of it would have been perfect but for this fate. O Joe!
my poor, dear, terrible cobra! to think that I should ever be afraid to
look into your face in my life!

Joe wanted to call to my mind one other reminiscence,--a night when we
two walked to the old wharf, and went out to the end of it, and sat
there looking inland, watching the inky waves slide up and down the
beach, while the full moon rose over the superb mountains where the
clouds were heaped like wool, and the very air seemed full of utterances
that you could almost hear and understand but for something that made
them all a mystery. I tried then, if ever I tried in my life, to make
Joe a little less bad than he was naturally, and he seemed nearly
inclined to be better, and would, I think, have been so, but for the
thousand temptations that gravitated to him when we got on solid earth
again. He forgot my precepts then, and I'm afraid I forgot them myself.
Joe remembered that night vividly. I was touched to hear him confess it;
and I pray earnestly that that one moment may plead for him in the last
day, if, indeed, he needs any special plea other than that Nature has
published for her own.

"Sing for me, Joe," said I; and Joe, still crouching on the other side
of the lattice, sang some of his old songs. One of them, a popular
melody, was echoed through the little settlement, where faint voices
caught up the chorus, and the night was wildly and weirdly musical. We
walked by the sea the next day, and the day following that, Joe taking
pains to stay on the leeward side of me,--he was so careful to keep the
knowledge of his fate uppermost in his mind: how could I dismiss it
from my own, when it was branded in his countenance? The desolated
beauty of his face plead for measureless pity, and I gave it, out of my
prodigality, yet felt that I could not begin to give sufficient.

Link by link he was casting off his hold on life; he was no longer a
complete being; his soul was prostrated in the miry clay, and waited, in
agony, its long deliverance.

In leaving the leper village, I had concluded to say nothing to Joe,
other than the usual "_aloha_" at night, when I could ride off, in the
darkness, and, sleeping at the foot of the cliff, ascend it in the first
light of morning, and get well on my journey before the heat of the day.
We took a last walk by the rocks on the shore; heard the sea breathing
its long breath under the hollow cones of lava, with a noise like a
giant leper in his asthmatic agony. Joe heard it, and laughed a little,
and then grew silent; and finally said he wanted to leave the place,--he
hated it; he loved Lahaina dearly: how was everybody in Lahaina?--a
question he had asked me hourly since my arrival.

When night came I asked Joe to sing, as usual; so he gathered his mates
about him, and they sang the songs I liked best. The voices rang,
sweeter than ever, up from the group of singers congregated a few rods
off, in the darkness; and while they sang, my horse was saddled, and I
quietly bade adieu to my dear friends, the keepers, and mounting, walked
the horse slowly up the grass-grown road. I shall never see little Joe
again, with his pitiful face, growing gradually as dreadful as a
cobra's, and almost as fascinating in its hideousness. I waited, a
little way off, in the darkness,--waited and listened, till the last
song was ended, and I knew he would be looking for me, to say _Good
night_. But he didn't find me; and he will never again find me in this
life, for I left him sitting in the dark door of his sepulchre,--sitting
and singing in the mouth of his grave,--clothed all in death.

[Decoration]




[Decoration]

THE NIGHT-DANCERS OF WAIPIO.


The afternoon sun was tinting the snowy crest of Mauna Kea, and folds of
shadow were draping the sea-washed eastern cliffs of Hawaii, as Felix
and I endeavored to persuade our fagged steeds that they must go and
live, or stay and die in the middle of a lava-trail by no means
inviting. As we rode, we thought of the scandal that had so recently
regaled our too willing ears: here it is, in a mild solution, to be
taken with three parts of disbelief.

Two venerable and warm-hearted missionaries, whose good works seemed to
have found dissimilar expression, equally effective, I trust, proved
their specialties to be church-building.

Rev. Mr. A seemed to think the more the merrier, and his pretty little
meeting-houses looked as though they had been baked in the lot, like a
sheet of biscuits; while Rev. Mr. B condensed his efforts into the
consummation of one resplendent edifice. Mr. A was always wondering why
Mr. B should waste his money in a single church, while Mr. B was
nonplussed at seeing Mr. A break out in a rash of diminutive chapels.
Well, Felix and I were riding northward up the coast, over dozens and
dozens of lovely ridges; through scores of deep gullies cushioned with
ferns as high as our pommels, and fording numberless streams, white with
froth and hurry, eagerly seeking the most exquisite valley in the
Pacific, as some call it. We rode till we were tired out twenty times
over; again and again we looked forward to the bit of Mardi-life we were
about to experience in the vale of the Waipio, while now and then we
passed one of Mr. A's pretty little churches. Once we were impatient
enough to make inquiry of a native who was watching our progress with
considerable emotion: there is always some one to watch you when you are
wishing yourself at the North Pole. Our single spectator affected an air
of gravity, and seemed quite interested as he said, "Go six or seven
churches farther on that trail, and you'll come to Waipio." On we went
with renewed spirits, for the churches were frequent, almost within
sight of each other. But we faltered presently and lost our reckoning,
they were so much alike. Again we asked our way of a solitary watcher on
a hill-top, who had had his eye upon us ever since we rose above the rim
of the third ridge back: he revealed to us the glad fact that we were
only two churches from Paradise! How we tore over the rest of that
straight and narrow way with the little life left to us, and came in
finally all of a foam, fairly jumping the last mite of a chapel that
hung upon the brink of the beautiful valley like a swallow's nest!
And down we dropped into fifty fathoms of the sweetest twilight
imaginable,--so sweet it seemed to have been born of a wilderness of the
night-blooming cereus and fed forever on jasmine buds.

There were shelter and refreshment for two hungry souls, and we slid out
of our saddles as though we had been boned expressly for a cannibal
feast.

By this time the rosy flush on Mauna Kea had faded, and its superb brow
was pale with an unearthly pallor. "Come in," said the host; and he led
us under the thatched gable, that was fragrant as new-mown hay. There we
sat, "in," as he called it, though there was never a side to the concern
thicker than a shadow.

A stream flowed noiselessly at our feet. Canoes drifted by us, with
dusky and nude forms bowed over the paddles. Each occupant greeted
us, being guests in the valley, just lifting their slumberous
eyelids,--masked batteries, that made Felix forget his danger; they
seldom paused, but called back to us from the gathering darkness with
inexpressibly tender, contralto voices.

Thereupon we were summoned to dinner in another apartment, screened with
vines. The faint flicker of the tapers suggested that what breath of air
might be stirring came from the mountain, and it brought with it a
message from the orangery up the valley. "How will you take your
oranges?" queried Felix; "in pulp, liquid, or perfume?"--and such a
dense odor swept past us at the moment, I thought I had taken them in
the triple forms. "You are just in time," said our host. "Why, what's
up?" asked I. "The moon will be up presently, and after moonrise you
shall see the _hula-hula_."

Felix desired to be enlightened as to the nature of the
what-you-call-it, and was assured that it was worth seeing, and would
require no explanatory chorus when its hour came.

It was at least a mile to the scene of action; a tortuous stream wound
thither, navigable in spots, but from time to time the canoe would have
to take to the banks for a short cut into deeper water.

"I can never get there," growled Felix; "I'm full of needles and pins";
to which the host responded by excusing himself for a few moments,
leaving Felix and me alone. It was deathly still in the valley, though a
thousand crickets sang, and the fish smacked their round mouths at the
top of the water. Evening comes slowly in those beloved tropics, but it
comes so satisfactorily that there is nothing left out.

A moonlight night is a continuous festival. The natives sing and dance
till daybreak, making it all up by sleeping till the next twilight.
Nothing is lost by this ingenious and admirable arrangement. Why should
they sleep, when a night there has the very essence of five nights
anywhere else, extracted and enriched with spices till it is so
inspiring that the soul cries out in triumph, and the eyes couldn't
sleep if they would?

At this period, enter to us the host, with several young native girls,
who seat themselves at our feet, clasping each a boot-leg encasing the
extremities of Felix and myself.

Felix kicked violently, and left the room with some embarrassment, and I
appealed to the hospitable gentleman of the house, who was smiling
somewhat audibly at our perplexity.

He assured me that if I would throw myself upon the mats in the corner,
two of these maids would speedily relieve me of any bodily pain I might
at that moment be suffering with.

I did so: the two proceeded as set down in the verbal prospectus; and
whatever bodily pain I may have possessed at the beginning of the
process speedily dwindled into insignificance by comparison with the
tortures of my novel cure. Every limb had to be unjointed and set over
again. Places were made for new joints, and I think the new joints were
temporarily set in, for my arms and legs went into angles I had never
before seen them in, nor have I since been able to assume those
startling attitudes. The stomach was then kneaded like dough. The
ribs were crushed down against the spine, and then forced out by
well-directed blows in the back. The spinal column was undoubtedly
abstracted, and some mechanical substitute now does its best to help me
through the world. The arms were tied in bow-knots behind, and the skull
cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg, worked into shape again,
and left to heal.

By this time I was unconscious, and for an hour my sleep promised to be
eternal. I must have lain flat on the matting, without a curve in me,
when Nature, taking pity, gradually let me rise and assume my own
proportions, as though a little leaven had been mixed in my making over.

The awakening was like coming from a bath of the elements. I breathed to
the tips of my toes. Perfumes penetrated me till I was saturated with
them. I felt a thousand years younger; and as I looked back upon the old
life I seemed to have risen from, I thought of it much as a butterfly
must think of his grub-hood, and was in the act of expanding my wings,
when I saw Felix, just recovering, a few feet from me, apparently as
ecstatic as myself. I never dared to ask him how he was reduced to
submission, for I little imagined he could so far forget himself. There
are some sudden and inexplicable revolutions in the affairs of humanity
that should not be looked into too closely, because a chaotic chasm
yawns between the old man and the new, which no one has ever yet
explored. Felix sprang to his feet like Prometheus unbound, and embraced
me with fervor, as one might after a hair-breadth escape, exclaiming,
"Did you ever see anything like it, Old Boy?" to which the Old Boy, thus
familiarly addressed (O. B. is a pet monogram of mine, designed and
frequently executed by Felix), responded, "There wasn't much to see, but
my feelings were past expression." "What's its name?" asked Felix. "I
think they call it _lomi-lomi_," said I. "Pass _lomi-lomi_!" shouted
Felix; and then we both roared again, which summoned the host, who
congratulated us and invited us to his canoe.

Felix again endeavored to fathom the mysteries of the _hula-hula_. Was
it something to eat?--did they keep it tied in the daytime?--what was
its color? etc., till the amused gentleman who was conducting us to an
exhibition of the great Unknown nearly capsized our absurdly narrow
canoe in the very deepest part of the creek. Bands of fishermen and
women passed us, wading breast-high in the water, beating it into a foam
before them, and singing at the top of their voices as they drove the
fish down stream into a broad net a few rods below. Grass-houses, half
buried in foliage, lined the mossy banks; while the dusky groups of
women and children, clustering about the smouldering flames that
betokened the preparation of the evening meal, added not a little to the
poetry of twilight in the tropics.

Felix thought he would like to turn Kanaka on the spot; so we beached
the canoe, and approached the fire, built on a hollow stone under a
tamarind-tree, and were at once offered the cleanest mat to sit on, and
a calabash of _poi_ for our refreshment. How to eat paste without a
spoon was the next question. The whole family volunteered to show us;
drew up around the calabash in a hungry circle, and dipped in with a
vengeance. Six right hands spread their first and second fingers like
sign-boards pointing to a focus in the very centre of that _poi_-paste;
six fists dove simultaneously, and were buried in the luscious mass.
There was a spasmodic working in the elbows, an effort to come to the
top, and in a moment the hands were lifted aloft in triumph, and seemed
to be tracing half a dozen capital O's in the transparent air, during
which manoeuvre the mass of _poi_ adhering to the fingers assumed fair
proportions, resembling, to a remarkable degree, large, white swellings;
whereupon they were immediately conveyed to the several mouths,
instinctively getting into the right one, and, having discharged
freight, reappeared as good as ever, if not better than before.

"Disgusting!" gasped Felix, as he returned to the water-side. I thought
him unreasonable in his harsh judgment, assuring him that our own flour
was fingered as often before it came, at last, to our lips in the form
of bread. "Moreover," I added, "this _poi_ is glutinous: the moment a
finger enters it, a thin coating adheres to the skin, and that finger
may wander about the calabash all day without touching another particle
of the substance. Therefore, six or sixteen fellows fingering in one
dish for dinner are in reality safer than we, who eat steaks that have
been mesmerized under the hands of the butcher and the cook."

Felix scorned to reply, but breathed a faint prayer for a safe return to
Chicago, as we slid into the middle of the stream, and resumed our
course.

The boughs of densely leaved trees reached out to one another across the
water. We proceeded with more caution as the channel grew narrow; and
pressing through a submerged thicket of reeds, we routed a flock of
water-fowls that wheeled overhead on heavy wings, filling the valley
with their clamor.

Two or three dogs barked sleepily off somewhere in the darkness, and the
voice of some one calling floated to us as clear as a bird's note,
though we knew it must be far away. We strode through a cane-field, its
smoky plumes just tipped with moonlight, and saw the pinnacle of Mauna
Kea, as spacious and splendid as the fairy pavilion that Nourgihan
brought to Pari-Banou, illuminated as for a festival. To the left, a
stream fell from the cliff, a ribbon of gauze fluttering noiselessly in
the wind.

"O, look!" said Felix, who had yielded again to the influences of
Nature. Looking, I saw the moon resting upon the water for a moment,
while the dew seemed actually to drip from her burnished disk. Again
Felix exclaimed, or was on the point of exclaiming, when he checked
himself in awe. I ran to him, and was silent with him, while we two
stood worshipping one stately palm that rested its glorious head upon
the glowing bosom of the moon, like the Virgin in the radiant aureola.

"Well," said our host, "supposing we get along!" We got along, by land
and water, into a village in an orange-grove. There was a subdued murmur
of many voices. I think the whole community would have burst out into a
song of some sort at the slightest provocation. On we paced, in Indian
file, through narrow lanes, under the shining leaves. Pale blossoms
rained down upon us, and the air was oppressively sweet. Groups of
natives sat in the lanes, smoking and laughing. Lovers made love in the
face of heaven, utterly unconscious of any human presence. Felix grew
nervous, and proposed withdrawing; but whither, O Felix, in all these
islands, wouldst thou hope to find love unrequited, or lovers shamefaced
withal? Much Chicago hath made thee mad!

Through a wicket we passed, where a sentinel kept ward. Within the
bamboo paling, a swarm of natives gathered about us, first questioning
the nature of our visit, which having proved entirely satisfactory, we
were welcomed in real earnest, and offered a mat in an inner room of a
large house, rather superior to the average, and a disagreeable
liquor,--brewed of oranges, very intoxicating when not diluted, and
therefore popular.

We were evidently the lions of the hour, for we sat in the centre of the
first row of spectators who were gathered to witness the _hula-hula_. We
reclined as gracefully as possible upon our mats, supported by plump
pillows, stuffed with dried ferns. Slender rushes--strung with
_kukui_-nuts, about the size of chestnuts, and very oily--were planted
before us like foot-lights, which, being lighted at the top, burned
slowly downward, till the whole were consumed, giving a good flame for
several hours.

The great mat upon the floor before us was the stage. On one side of it
a half-dozen muscular fellows were squatted, with large calabashes
headed with tightly drawn goat-skins. These were the drummers and
singers, who could beat nimbly with their fingers, and sing the epics of
their country, to the unceasing joy of all listeners. "It's an opera!"
shouted Felix, in a frenzy of delight at his discovery. A dozen
performers entered, sitting in two lines, face to face,--six women and
six men. Each bore a long joint of bamboo, slit at one end like a broom.
Then began a singularly intricate exercise, called _pi-ulu_. Taking a
bamboo in one hand, they struck it in the palm of the other, on the
shoulder, on the floor in front, to left and right; thrust it out before
them, and were parried by the partners opposite; crossed it over and
back, and turned in a thousand ways to a thousand metres, varied with
chants and pauses. "Then it's a pantomime," added Felix, getting
interested in the unusual skill displayed. For half an hour or more the
thrashing of the bamboos was prolonged, while we were hopelessly
confused in our endeavors to follow the barbarous harmony, which was
never broken nor disturbed by the expert and tireless performers.

During the first rest, liquor was served in gourds. Part of the company
withdrew to smoke, and the conversation became general and noisy. Felix
was enthusiastic, and drank the health of some of the younger members of
the _troupe_ who had offered him the gourd.

A rival company then repeated the _pi-ulu_, with some additions; the
gourds were again filled and emptied. "Now for the _hula-hula_," said
the host, who had imbibed with Felix, though he reserved his enthusiasm
for something less childish than _pi-ulu_. It is the national dance,
taught to all children by their parents, but so difficult to excel in
that the few who perfect themselves can afford to travel on this one
specialty.

There was a murmur of impatience, speedily checked, and followed by a
burst of applause, as a band of beautiful girls, covered with wreaths of
flowers and vines, entered and seated themselves before us. While the
musicians beat an introductory overture upon the tom-toms, the dancers
proceeded to bind shawls and scarfs about their waists, turban-fashion.
They sat in a line, facing us, a foot or two apart. The loose sleeves of
their dresses were caught up at the shoulder, exposing arms of almost
perfect symmetry, while their bare throats were scarcely hidden by the
necklaces of jasmines that coiled about them.

Then the leader of the band, who sat, gray-headed and wrinkled, at one
end of the room, throwing back his head, uttered a long, wild, and
shrill guttural,--a sort of invocation to the goddess of the
_hula-hula_. There had, no doubt, been some sort of sacrifice offered in
the early part of the evening,--such as a pig or a fowl,--for the dance
has a religious significance, and is attended by its appropriate
ceremonies. When this clarion cry had ended, the dance began, all
joining in with wonderfully accurate rhythm, the body swaying slowly
backward and forward, to left and right; the arms tossing, or rather
waving, in the air above the head, now beckoning some spirit of light,
so tender and seductive were the emotions of the dancers, so graceful
and free the movements of the wrists; now, in violence and fear, they
seemed to repulse a host of devils that hovered invisibly about them.

The spectators watched and listened breathlessly, fascinated by the
terrible wildness of the song and the monotonous thrumming of the
accompaniment. Presently the excitement increased. Swifter and more
wildly the bare arms beat the air, embracing, as it were, the airy forms
that haunted the dancers, who rose to their knees, and, with astonishing
agility, caused the clumsy turbans about their loins to quiver with an
undulatory motion, increasing or decreasing with the sentiment of the
song and the enthusiasm of the spectators.

Felix wanted to know "how long they could keep that up and live?"

Till daybreak, as we found! There was a little resting-spell--a very
little resting-spell, now and then--for the gourd's sake, or three
whiffs at a pipe that would poison a White Man in ten minutes; and
before we half expected it, or had a thought of urging the unflagging
dancers to renew their marvellous gyrations, they were at it in terrible
earnest.

From the floor to their knees, from their knees to their feet, now
facing us, now turning from us, they spun and ambled, till the ear was
deafened with cheers and boisterous, half-drunken, wholly passionate
laughter.

The room whirled with the reeling dancers, who seemed encircled with
living serpents in the act of swallowing big lumps of something from
their throats clear to the tips of their tails, and the convulsions
continued till the hysterical dancers staggered and fell to the floor,
overcome by unutterable fatigue.

The sympathetic Felix fell with them, his head sinking under one of the
rush candles, that must have burned into his brain had he been suffered
to immolate himself at that inappropriate and unholy time and place.
This was the seductive dance still practised in secret, though the law
forbids it; and to the Hawaiian it is more beautiful, because more
sensuous, than anything else in the world.

I proposed departing at this stage of the festival, but Felix said it
was not practicable. He felt unwell, and suggested the efficacy of
another attack of _lomi-lomi_.

A slight variation in the order of the dances followed. A young lover,
seated in the centre of the room, beat a tattoo upon his calabash and
sang a song of love. In a moment he was answered. Out of the darkness
rose the sweet, shrill voice of the loved one. Nearer and nearer it
approached; the voice rang clear and high, melodiously swelling upon the
air. It must have been heard far off in the valley, it was so plaintive
and penetrating. Secreted at first behind shawls hung in the corner of
the room, some dramatic effect was produced by her entrance at the right
moment. She enacted her part with graceful energy. To the regular and
melancholy thrumming of the calabash, she sang her song of love.
Yielding to her emotion, she did not hesitate to betray all, neither was
he of the calabash slow to respond; and, scorning the charms of
goat-skin and gourd, he sprang toward her in the madness of his soul,
when she, having reached the climax of desperation, was hurried from the
scene of her conquest amid whirlwinds of applause.

"It's a dance, that's what it is!" muttered Felix, as the audience began
slowly to disperse. Leading him back to the canoe, we had the whole
night's orgie reported to us in a very mixed and reiterative manner, as
well as several attempts at illustrating the peculiarities of the
performance, which came near resulting in a watery grave for three, or
an upset canoe, at any rate. Our host, to excuse any impropriety, for
which he felt more or less responsible, said "it was so natural for them
to be jolly under all circumstances that when they have concluded to die
they make their P. P. C.'s with infinite grace, and then die on time."

Of course they are jolly; and to prove it, I told Felix how the lepers,
who had been banished to one little corner of the kingdom, and forbidden
to leave there in the flesh, were as merry as the merriest, and once
upon a time those decaying remnants of humanity actually gave a grand
ball in their hospital. There was a general clearing out of disabled
patients, and a brushing up of old finery, while the ball itself was
_the_ topic of conversation. Two or three young fellows, who had a few
fingers left (they unjoint and drop off as the disease progresses),
began to pick up a tune or two on bamboo flutes. Old, young, and
middle-aged took a sly turn in some dark corner, getting their stiffened
joints limber again.

Night came at last. The lamps flamed in the death-chamber of the
lazar-house. Many a rejoicing soul had fled from that foul spot, to
flash its white wings in the eternal sunshine.

At an early hour the strange company assembled. The wheezing of voices
no longer musical, the shuffling of half-paralyzed limbs over the bare
floor, the melancholy droning of those bamboo flutes, and the wild sea
moaning in the wild night were the sweetest sounds that greeted them.
And while the flutes piped dolorously to this unlovely spectacle, there
was a rushing to and fro of unlovely figures; a bleeding, half-blind
leper, seizing another of the accursed beings,--snatching her, as it
were, from the grave, in all her loathsome clay,--dragged her into the
bewildering maelstrom of the waltz.

Naturally excitable, heated with exertion, drunk with the very odors of
death that pervaded the hall of revels, that mad crowd reeled through
the hours of the _fête_. Satiated, at last, in the very bitterness of
their unnatural gayety, they called for the _hula-hula_ as a fitting
close.

In that reeking atmosphere, heavy with the smoke of half-extinguished
lamps, they fed on the voluptuous _abandon_ of the dancers till passion
itself fainted with exhaustion.

"That was a dance of death, was it not, Felix?" Felix lay on his mat,
sleeping heavily, and evidently unmindful of a single word I had
uttered.

Our time was up at daybreak, and, with an endless deal of persuasion,
Felix followed me out of the valley to the little chapel on the cliff.
Our horses took a breath there, and so did we, bird's-eying the scene of
the last night's orgie.

Who says it isn't a delicious spot,--that deep, narrow, and secluded
vale, walled by almost perpendicular cliffs, hung with green tapestries
of ferns and vines; that slender stream, like a thread of silver,
embroidering a carpet of Nature's richest pattern; that torrent, leaping
from the cliff into a garden of citrons; the sea sobbing at its mouth,
while wary mariners, coasting in summer afternoons, catch glimpses of
the tranquil and forbidden paradise, yet are heedless of all its beauty,
and reck not the rustling of the cane-fields, nor the voices of the
charmers, because--because these things are so common in that latitude
that one grows naturally indifferent?

As for Felix, who talks in his sleep of the _hula-hula_, and insists
that only by the _lomi-lomi_ he shall be saved, he points a moral,
though at present he is scarcely in a condition to adorn any tale
whatever; and said moral I shall be glad to furnish, on application, to
any sympathetic soul who has witnessed by proxy the unlawful revels of
those night-dancers of Waipio.




[Decoration]

PEARL-HUNTING IN THE POMOTOUS.


The Great Western ducked in the heavy swell, shipping her regular
deck-load of salt-water every six minutes. Now the Great Western was
nothing more nor less than a seventeen-ton schooner, two hours out from
Tahiti. She was built like an old shoe, and shovelled in a head sea as
though it was her business.

It was something like sea life, wading along her submerged deck from
morning till night, with a piece of raw junk in one hand and a briny
biscuit in the other; we never _could_ keep a fire in _that_ galley, and
as for hard tack, the sooner it got soaked through the sooner it was off
our minds, for we knew to this complexion it must shortly come.

Two hours out from Tahiti we settled our course, wafting a theatrical
kiss or two toward the gloriously green pyramid we were turning our
backs on, as it slowly vanished in the blue desert of the sea.

A thousand palm-crowned and foam-girdled reefs spangle the ocean to the
north and east of Tahiti. This train of lovely satellites is known as
the Dangerous Archipelago, or, more commonly in that latitude, the
Pomotou Islands. It's the very hot-bed of cocoa-nut oil, pearls,
half-famished Kanakas, shells, and shipwrecks. The currents are rapid
and variable; the winds short, sharp, and equally unreliable. If you
would have adventure, the real article and plenty of it, make your will,
bid farewell to home and friends, and embark for the Pomotous. I started
on this principle, and repented knee-deep in the deck-breakers, as we
butted our way through the billows, bound for one of the Pomotous on a
pearl hunt.

Three days I sat in sackcloth and salt water. Three nights I swashed in
my greasy bunk, like a solitary sardine in a box with the side knocked
out. In my heart of hearts I prayed for deliverance: you see there is no
backing out of a schooner, unless you crave death in fifty fathoms of
phosphorescent liquid and a grave in a shark's maw. Therefore I prayed
for more wind from the right quarter, for a sea like a boundless
mill-pond; in short, for speedy deliverance on the easiest terms
possible. Notwithstanding, we continued to bang away at the great waves
that crooked their backs under us and hissed frightfully as they
enveloped the Great Western with spray until the fourth night out, when
the moon gladdened us and promised much while we held our breath in
anxiety.

We were looking for land. We'd been looking for three hours, scarcely
speaking all that time. It's a serious matter raising a Pomotou by
moonlight.

"Land!" squeaked a weak voice about six feet above us. A lank fellow,
with his legs corkscrewed around the shrouds, and his long neck
stretched to windward, where it veered like a weather-cock in a
nor'wester, chuckled as he sung out "Land!" and felt himself a little
lower than Christopher Columbus thereafter. "Where away?" bellowed our
chunky little captain, as important as if he were commanding a grown-up
ship. "Two points on the weather-bow!" piped the lookout, with the voice
of one soaring in space, but unhappily choked in the last word by a
sudden lurch of the schooner that brought him speedily to the deck,
where he lost his identity and became a proper noun, second person,
singular, for the rest of the cruise.

Now, "two points" is an indefinite term that embraces any obstacle ahead
of anything; but the "weather-bow" has been the salvation of many a
craft in her distress; so we gave three cheers for the "weather-bow,"
and proceeded to sweep the horizon with unwinking gaze. We could
scarcely tell how near the land might lie; fancied we could already hear
the roar of surf-beaten reefs, and every wave that reared before us
seemed the rounded outline of an island. Of course we shortened sail,
not knowing at what moment we might find ourselves close upon some low
sea-garden nestling under the rim of breakers that fenced it in, and
being morally averse to running it down without warning.

It was scarcely midnight; the moon was radiant; we were silently
watching, wrapped in the deep mystery that hung over the weather-bow.

The wind suddenly abated; it was as though it sifted through trees and
came to us subdued with a whisper of fluttering leaves and a breath of
spice. We knew what it meant, and our hearts leaped within us as over
the bow loomed the wave-like outline of shadow that sank not again like
the other waves, neither floated off cloud-like, but seemed to be
bearing steadily down upon us,--a great whale hungry for a modern Jonah.

What a night it was! We heard the howl of waters now; saw the palm
boughs glisten in the moonlight, and the glitter and the flash of foam
that fringed the edges of the half-drowned islet.

It looked for all the world like a grove of cocoa-trees that had waded
out of sight of land, and didn't know which way to turn next. This was
the Ultima Thule of the Great Western's voyage, and she seemed to know
it, for she behaved splendidly at last, laying off and on till morning
in fine style, evidently as proud as a ship-of-line.

I went below and dozed, with the low roar of the reef quite audible; a
fellow gets used to such dream-music, and sleeps well to its
accompaniment.

At daybreak we began beating up against wind and tide, hoping to work
into smooth water by sunrise, which we did easily enough, shaking hands
all around over a cup of thick coffee and molasses as three fathoms of
chain whizzed overboard after a tough little anchor that buried itself
in a dim wilderness of corals and sea-grass.

Then and there I looked about me with delighted eyes. The Great Western
rode at anchor in a shallow lake, whose crystal depths seemed never to
have been agitated by any harsher breath than at that moment kissed
without ruffling its surface. Around us swept an amphitheatre of hills,
covered with a dense growth of tropical foliage and cushioned to the hem
of the beach with thick sod of exquisite tint and freshness. The narrow
rim of beach that sloped suddenly to the tideless margin of the lake was
littered with numberless slender canoes drawn out of the water like so
many fish, as though they would navigate themselves in their natural
element, and they were, therefore, not to be trusted alone too near it.
Around the shore, across the hills, and along the higher ridges waved
innumerable cocoa-palms, planted like a legion of lances about the
encampment of some barbaric prince.

As for the very blue sky and the very white scud that shot across it,
they looked windy enough; moreover we could a

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