MYSTIC ISLES 411 



freely spoken and written, and natural acts be less cen- 

 sured than elsewhere. Even in late years their con- 

 ception of nature has been that of the painter Corot, 

 delicate, tender, and sad ; not free and primitive. They 

 had possessed Tahiti scores of years, and yet one hardly 

 saw^ a Frenchman, and never a Frenchwoman, in the dis- 

 tricts. The French seldom ever ventured in the sea or 

 the stream or to the reef. Other Europeans and Amer- 

 icans found those interesting, at least, a little. Brooke 

 and I swam every day off the wharf of the fhefferie. 

 The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the 

 vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant 

 blond, gleamed in the violet radiancy like a dream figure 

 of ivory. We dived into schools of the vari-colored 

 fish, which we could see a dozen feet below, and tried to 

 seize them in our hands, and we spent hours floating and 

 playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the sun. 

 We laughed at his native name, Pupure, which means 

 fair, and at the titles given Tahiti by visitors: the New 

 Cytherea by Bougainville, a russet Ireland by McBir- 

 ney, my fellow voyager on the Noa-Noa, and Aph- 

 Rhodesia by a South-African who had fought the Boers 

 and loved the Tahitian girls and who now idled with us. 

 Brooke, as we paddled over the dimpled lagoon, quoted 

 the Greek for an apt description, the innumerable 

 laughter of the waves. Brooke had been in Samoa, and 

 was about to leave for England after several months in 

 Tahiti. He WTOte home that he had found the most 

 ideal place in the world to work and live in. On the 

 wide veranda he composed three poems of merit, "The 

 Great Lover," "Tiare Tahiti," and "Retrospect." He 

 could understand the Polynesian, and he loved the race. 



