ers, mangos,
and a hunk of bread. A stump of lead-pencil was behind his ear. His
hair, a dusty white, met the frayed collar of the coat, and through
the temporary gaps which he made in its length to cool his body,
I saw it like a gnarled and mossy tree. His hands were grimy and
his nails black-edged, but there was intellect in his eye, and a
broken force in his huddled, loosed attitude. He was not decrepit,
or with a trace of humility, but had the ease of the philosopher
and also his detachment. It was plain he did the best he could with
his garb, and was entirely undisturbed, and perhaps even unmindful,
of its ludicrousness. He was as serene as Diogenes must have been
when he crawled naked from his tub into the sun.

We talked first of the horses in the lagoon a dozen yards from us,
their grooms or their owners submerging them, and squatting on the
ground to chat as the horses wallowed willingly in five feet of salt
water. We agreed that the Tahitians were as bad drivers as the Chinese,
and that they were, wittingly or unwittingly, cruel to their beasts of
burden. This led to a discussion of native traits, and he was caustic
in his castigation of the Tahitians. He asked me my name and what
brought me to Tahiti; and when, wanting to be as honest-spoken as he,
I said, "Romance, adventure," he burst out that I was crazy.

"I have been here seventeen years," he said bitterly--"me, Ivan
Stroganoff, who was once happy as secretary to the governor of
Irkutsk! I was better off when I was on the Merrimac fighting the
Monitor, or with Mosby, the guerilla, than I am in this accursed
island. I think a man is mad who can leave Tahiti and stays here. I
wish I could go away. I would like to die elsewhere. I am eighty years
old, I starve here, and I sleep in a chicken-coop in the suburbs."

"You are lodged exactly as was Charlie Stoddard, who wrote 'South
Sea Idylls,'" I interposed.

"They have lied always, those writers about Tahiti," said Ivan
Stroganoff. "Melville, Loti, Moerenhout, Pallander, your Stevenson,--I
don't know that Stoddard,--all are meretricious, with their pomp of
words and no truth. I have comparisons to make with other nations. I
am more than sixty years a traveler, and I am here seventeen years
without cessation, in hell all the time."

"You Russians always like the French. How about their achievements
here?" I questioned, hoping to lift his shade of melancholy.

"The French?" he repeated. "They are brigand