Tahitian commissary, in his
beflagged official residence; the merchants, in their deserted stores;
and even the club-servant in the club, his head fallen forward on the
bottle-counter, under the map of the world and the cards of navy
officers. In the whole length of the single shoreside street, with its
scattered board houses looking to the sea, its grateful shade of palms
and green jungle of puraos, no moving figure could be seen. Only, at the
end of the rickety pier, that once (in the prosperous days of the
American rebellion) was used to groan under the cotton of John Hart,
there might have been spied upon a pile of lumber the famous tattooed
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