478 MYSTIC ISLES 



of chiefly descent, a boy of seven, and of a guileless, be- 

 witching disposition, made me his intimate friend, and 

 through his sharp eyes I discovered phenomena that 

 might have escaped my untutored mind. He lifted a 

 stone, and beneath it was a spider larger than a taran- 

 tula. It was tabu to Tahitians, harmless, and a vora- 

 cious eater of insects. Spiders are larger in these trop- 

 ics than elsewhere, and here, too, the male was smaller 

 than the female. Being seized and slain and devoured 

 by his lady love even in the very transports of husbandly 

 affection, it had been bitten in on his subconscious sensi- 

 bilities that diminutiveness was life-saving, and natural 

 selection had made him inferior in size to his cannibal 

 mate. He had a very shrinking attitude in her pres- 

 ence, as Socrates must have affected about Xantippe. 



At eleven o'clock of the forenoon I, with Matatini 

 and Raiere, a youth of twenty, strolled down the grassy 

 street to the garden of Alfred, where Choti might be 

 painting under the trees, and if a halloo did not bring 

 him bounding to us, we went on to T'yonni's, where he 

 would surely be, either under the mango trees or in the 

 salon. Choti had many canvases completed, some six 

 feet long, and he also did excellent silver-point heads 

 of the villagers. Tahitians were indifferent models, as 

 they were not much interested in pictures, not seeing 

 objects, as we do, and found posing irksome. Only 

 Choti's friendship for them, his bonhomie, and many 

 merry jokes in their tongue could keep them still for 

 his purposes. 



T'yonni's house was half a mile from mj^ own. A 

 quarter of a mile farther, and the same distance from 

 the junction of lagoon and river, we had our swimming- 



