hould assume the office of cook, and that Paul-Typee
should only work when it suited him, which would not have been very
often. The offer was friendly and favourable, but it was refused. A
hospitable invitation to remain as guests as long as was convenient to
them, was likewise rejected, and, bent upon a ramble, the restless
adventurers left the vale of Martair. Even greater inducements would
probably have been insufficient to keep them there. They had been so
long on the rove, that change of scene had become essential to their
happiness. The doctor, especially, was anxious to be off to Tamai, an
inland village on the borders of a lake, where the fruits were the
finest, and the women the most beautiful and unsophisticated in all the
Society Islands. Epicurean Long Ghost had set his mind upon visiting
this terrestrial paradise, and thither his steady chum willingly
accompanied him. It was a day's journey on foot, allowing time for
dinner and siesta; and the path lay through wood and ravine, unpeopled
save by wild cattle. About noon they reached the heart of the island,
thus pleasantly described. "It was a green, cool hollow among the
mountains, into which we at last descended with a bound. The place was
gushing with a hundred springs, and shaded over with great solemn trees,
on whose mossy boles the moisture stood in beads." There is something
delightfully hydropathic in these lines; they cool one like a
shower-bath. He is a prime fellow, this common sailor Melville, at such
scraps of description, terse and true, placing the scene before us in
ten words. In long yarns he indulges not, but of such happy touches as
the above, we could quote a score. We have not room, either for them,
or for an account of the valley of Tamai, its hospitable inhabitants,
and its heathenish dances, performed in secret, and in dread of the
missionaries, by whom such saturnalia are forbidden. The place was
altogether so pleasant, that the doctor and his friend entertained
serious thoughts of settling there, or at least of making a long stay,
when one morning they were put to flight by the arrival of strangers,
said to be missionaries, with whom, vagrants as they were, they had no
wish to fall in. So they returned to their friend Zeke, nursing new and
ambitious projects. They had no intention of remaining with the
good-hearted Yankee, but merely paid him a flying visit, and that with
an interested motive. What they wanted of him was this. Although