d
white man, the living curiosity of Tai-o-hae.

His eyes were open, staring down the bay. He saw the mountains droop,
as they approached the entrance, and break down in cliffs; the surf boil
white round the two sentinel islets; and between, on the narrow bight
of blue horizon, Ua-pu upraise the ghost of her pinnacled mountain tops.
But his mind would take no account of these familiar features; as he
dodged in and out along the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory
would serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown faces and
white, of skipper and shipmate, king and chief, would arise before his
mind and vanish; he would recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour
of dawn; he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating festival;
perhaps he would summon up the form of that island princess for the love
of whom he had submitted his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer,
and now sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange
a figure of a European. Or perhaps from yet further back, sounds and
scents of England and his childhood might assail him: the merry clamour
of cathedral bells, the broom upon the foreland, the song of the river
on the weir.

It is bold water at the mouth of the bay; you can steer a ship about
either sentinel, close enough to toss a biscuit on the rocks. Thus
it chanced that, as the tattooed man sat dozing and dreaming, he was
startled into wakefulness and animation by the appearance of a flying
jib beyond the western islet. Two more headsails followed; and before
the tattooed man had scrambled to his feet, a topsail schooner, of some
hundred tons, had luffed about the sentinel and was standing up the bay,
close-hauled.

The sleeping city awakened by enchantment. Natives appeared upon all
sides, hailing each other with the magic cry "Ehippy"--ship; the Queen
stepped forth on her verandah, shading her eyes under a hand that was
a miracle of the fine art of tattooing; the commandant broke from his
domestic convicts and ran into the residency for his glass; the harbour
master, who was also the gaoler, came speeding down the Prison Hill; the
seventeen brown Kanakas and the French boatswain's mate, that make up
the complement of the war-schooner, crowded on the forward deck; and the
various English, Americans, Germans, Poles, Corsicans, and Scots--the
merchants and the clerks of Tai-o-hae--deserted their places of
business, and gathered, according to invariable custom, on