amusing measures, and a singer of the queer songs of the whites.

Recalling the cake-walks, sand-sifting, pigeon-winging, and
Juba-patting of the south, the sailor's hornpipe, the sword-dance of
the Scotch, and the metropolitan version of the tango, I did my best,
while the thrilled air of Oomoa Valley echoed these words, yelled to
my fullest lung capacity:

"There was an old soldier and he had a wooden leg,
And he had no tobacco, so tobacco did he beg.
Said the soldier to the sailor, 'Will you give me a chew?'
Said the sailor to the soldier, 'I'll be damned if I do!
Keep your mind on your number and your finger on your rocks,
And you'll always have tobacco in your old tobacco box.'"

Dancing and singing thus on the flat stones of the _paepae_ of the
six Fatu-hiva ladies, I gave back a thousand-fold their aid to my
disordered trousers. They laughed till they fell back on the rocks,
they lifted the ends of their _pareus_ to wipe their eyes, and they
demanded an encore, which I obligingly gave them in a song I had
kept in mind since boyhood. It was about a young man who took his
girl to a fancy ball, and afterward to a restaurant, and though he
had but fifty cents and she said she was not hungry, she ate the menu
from raw oysters to pousse-cafe, and turned it over for more.

It went with a Kerry jig that my grandfather used to do, and if
grandfather, with his rare ability, ever drew more uproarious
applause than I, it must have been a red-letter day for him, even in
Ireland. My hearers screamed in an agony of delight, and others
dwelling far away, or passing laden with breadfruit and bananas,
gathered while I chortled and leaped, and made the mountain-side
ring with Marquesan bravos.

With difficulty I made my escape, but my success pursued me.
"_Menike haka!_" came the cry from each house I passed, for the news
had been called over the distance, and to the farthest reaches of
the valley it was known that an American, the American who had come
on the _Roberta_, with a box that wrote, was dancing along the route.

As in the old days of war or other crisis, the cry had been raised,
and was echoed from all directions, and from hut to cocoanut-tree to
crag the call was heard, growing fainter and more feeble, dying
gradually from point to point, echoing farther and yet farther in the
distance. This was the ancient telegraph-system of the islanders, by
which an item of information sped in a moment to th