OF THE SOUTH SEAS 45 



which, maybe, designing nature has endowed us with to 

 spread her manifold creations, that even the most selfish 

 of men delight in planting in new environments exotic 

 seeds and plants, and in em'iching the fauna of far- 

 away islands with strange animals and insects. The 

 pepper- and the gum-tree that make southern Cali- 

 fornia's desert a bower, the oranges and lemons there 

 which send a million golden trophies to less-favored peo- 

 ples, are the flora of distant climes. Since the days of 

 the white discoverers, adventurers and priests, fighting 

 men and puritans, have added to the earth's treasury in 

 Tahiti and all these islands. 



Walking one morning along the waterfront, I met 

 two very dark negresses. They had on pink and black 

 dresses, with red cotton shawls, and they wore flaming 

 yellow handkerchiefs about their woolly heads. They 

 were as African as the Congo, and as strange in this 

 setting as Eskimos on Broadway. They felt their im- 

 portance, for they were of the few good cooks of French 

 dishes here. They spoke a French patois, and guf- 

 fawed loudly when one di'opped her basket of supplies 

 from her head. They were servants of the procureur 

 de la RSpuhlique, who had brought them from the 

 French colony of Martinique. 



Many races have mingled here. One saw their pig- 

 ments and their lines in the castes; here a soup^on of 

 the French and there a touch of the Dane; the Chileno, 

 himself a mestizo, had left his print in delicacy of fea- 

 ture, and the Irish his freckles and pug, which with 

 tawny skin, pearly teeth, and the superb form of the 

 pure Tahitian, left little to be desired in fetching and 

 saucy allurement. Thousands of sailors and merchants 



