as did
Captain Cook's men a century and a half ago, and the harvest showed
in numerous shadings of colors and variety of mixtures. Tahiti had,
since ship of Europe sighted Orofena, been a pasture for the wild
asses of the Wanderlust, a paradise into which they had brought their
snakes and left them to plague the natives.

There were phonographs shrieking at one from a score of verandas. The
automobile had become a menace to life and limb. There were two-score
motor-cars in Tahiti; but as the island is small, and most of them
were in the capital, one met them all the day, and might have thought
there were hundreds. Motor-buses, or "rubberneck-wagons," ran about the
city, carrying the natives for a franc on a brief tour, and, for more,
to country districts where good cheer and dances sped the night. A
dozen five- and seven-passenger cars with drivers were for hire. Most
nights until eleven or later the rented machines dashed about the
narrow streets, hooting and hissing, while their care-free occupants
played accordions or mouth-organs and sang songs of love. Louis de
Bougainville, once a French lawyer, and afterward soldier, sailor,
and discoverer and a lord under Bonaparte, had a monument in a tiny
green park hard by the strand and the road that, beginning there,
bands the island. He is best known the world about because his name is
given to the "four-o'clock" shrub in warm countries, as in Tahiti,
which sends huge masses of magenta or crimson blossoms climbing
on trellises and roofs. I walked to this monument from the Tiare
along the mossy bank of a little rivulet which ran to the beach. It
was early morning. The humble natives and whites were about their
daily tasks. Smoke rose from the iron pipes above the houses, coffee
scented the air, men and women were returning from the market-place
with bunches of cocoanuts, bananas, and breadfruit, strings of fish
and cuts of meat in papers. Many of them had their heads wreathed in
flowers or wore a tiare blossom over an ear.

The way in which one wears a flower supposedly signifies many
things. If one wore it over the left ear, one sought a sweetheart;
if over the right, it signified contentment, and though it was as
common as the wearing of hats, there were always jokes passing about
these flowers, exclamations of surprise or wishes of joy.

"What, you have left Terii?"

"Aita. No."

"Aue! I must change it at once."

Now, really there was no such idea in the native m