he masses of green; tall ferns
uncurled their fronds; giant creepers coiled like snakes through the
boughs, and the sluggish air was heavy with innumerable delicious
scents. I said to Mademoiselle N---- that the beauty of the islands
was like that of a fantastic dream, an Arabian Night's tale.

"Yes?" she said, with a note of weariness and irony. The feet of the
horses made a sucking sound on the oozy ground. "I am half white,"
she said after a moment, and as the horses' hoofs struck the rocky
trail again, she whipped up her mount and we galloped up the slope.

After a time the trail widened into a road and I saw before us a
queer enclosure. At first sight I thought it a wild-animal park.
There were small houses like cages and a big, box-like structure in
the center, all enclosed in a wire fence, a couple of acres in all.
Drawing nearer, I saw that the houses were cabins painted in gaudy
colors, and that the white box was a marble tomb of great size. Each
slab of marble was rimmed with scarlet cement, and the top of the
tomb, under a corrugated iron roof, was covered with those abominable
bead-wreaths from Paris.

Like the humbler Marquesans who have their coffins made and graves
dug before their passing, Mademoiselle N----'s father had seen to it
that this last resting-place was prepared while he lived, and he had
placed it here in the center of his plantation, before the house that
had been his home for thirty years. With something of his own crude
strength and barbaric taste, it stood there, the grim reminder of
her white father to the girl in whose veins his own blood mingled
with that of the savage.

She looked at it without emotion, and after I had surveyed it, we
dismounted and she led me into her house. It was a neat and
showily-furnished cottage, whose Nottingham-lace curtains, varnished
golden-oak chairs and ingrain carpet spoke of attempts at mail-order
beautification. Sitting on a horse-hair sofa, hard and slippery, I
drank wine and ate mangoes, while opposite me Mademoiselle N----'s
mother sat in stiff misery on a chair. She was a withered Marquesan
woman, barefooted and ugly, dressed in a red cotton garment of the
hideous night-gown pattern introduced by the missionaries, and her
eyes were tragedies of bewilderment and suffering, while her
toothless mouth essayed a smile and she struggled with a few words
of bad French.

Though Mademoiselle N---- was most hospitable, she was not at ease,
and I knew