ience-chamber.

In her low, delightfully broken English, in vivid French, or sibilant
Tahitian, Lovaina issued her orders to the girls, shouted maledictions
at the cook, or talked with all who came. Through that porch flowed all
the scandal of the South Seas--tales of hurricanes and waterspouts,
of shipwrecks, of accidents, of lucky deals in pearls or shells, of
copra, of new fashions and old inhabitants, of liaisons of white and
brown, of the flirtations of tourists, of the Government's issuing an
ultimatum on the price of fish, of how the consuls quarreled at a club
dinner, and of how one threw three ribs of roasted beef at the other,
who retorted with a whole sucking pig just from the native oven,
of Thomas' wife leaving him for Europe after a month's honeymoon;
and all the flotsam and jetsam of report and rumor, of joke and
detraction, which in an island with only one mail a month are the
topics of interest.

The porch was the clearing-house and the casual, oral record of the
spreading South Seas. It was the strangest salon of any capital,
and Lovaina the most fascinating of hostesses. Stories that would
be frowned down in many a man's club were laughed at lightly over
the table, but not when tourists, new-comers, were present. Then
the dignified Lovaina, repressing the oaths of potvaliant skippers,
putting her finger to her lips when a bald assertion was imminent,
said impressively:

"That swears don't go! What you think? To give bad name my good house?"

Only when old-timers were gathered, between steamships, when the
schooners came in a drove from the Paumotu atolls, and gold and silver
rang on the table at all hours, there was little restraint.

With only one mail a month to disturb the monotony, and but trifling
interest in anything north of the equator except prices of their
commodities, these unrepressed rebels against the conventions and even
the laws of the Occident must have their fling. On that camphor-wood
chest had sat many a church-going woman and dignified man of Europe or
America, resident for a month or longer in Tahiti, and shuddered at
what they heard--shuddered and listened, eager to hear those curious
incidents and astonishing opinions about life and affairs, and to mark
the difference between this and their own countries. It was without
even comment that people who at home or among the conventions would be
shocked at the subjects or their treatment, in these islands listened
thrilled or c