I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and passing many
sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.

After a considerable walk through a thrifty plantation, we were in
front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste. At
the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in
gold-rimmed eye-glasses and a red breechclout. His well-shaped, bald
head and punctilious manner would have commanded attention in any
attire.

I was introduced to Monsieur Francois Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived
here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never
been farther away than a few miles. Not even Tahiti had drawn him to
it. Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he had dwelt
contentedly in Oomoa.

After we had chatted for a few moments he invited me to be his guest.
I thought of the _Roberta_ and those two kinds of cockroaches, the
Blatta orientalis and the Blatta germanica, who raid by night and by
day respectively; I looked at Grelet's surroundings, and I accepted.
While the _Roberta_ gathered what copra she could and flitted, I
became a resident of Oomoa until such time as chance should give me
passage to my own island.

Twenty years before my host had planted the trees that embowered his
home. With the Swiss farmer's love of order, he had neglected
nothing to make neat, as nature had made beautiful, his surroundings.

"I learned agriculture and dairying on my father's farm in
Switzerland," said Grelet. "At school I learned more of their theory,
and when I had seen the gay cities of Europe, I went to the new
world to live. I was first at Pecos City, New Mexico, where I had
several hundred acres' of government land. I brought grape-vines
from Fresno, in California, but the water was insufficient for the
sterile soil, and I was forced to give up my land. From San
Francisco I sailed on the brig _Galilee_ for Tahiti. I have never
finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left
her and installed myself on the _Eunice_, a small trading-schooner,
and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of
the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land
and settled down here."

Grelet looked about him and smiled.

"It isn't bad, _hein_?"

It was not. From the little cove where his boat-house stood a road
swept windingly to his house through a garden of luxuriant verdure.
Mango and limes, breadfruit and cocoanut, _