OF THE SOUTH SEAS 493 



as the chief and I chanted the idealistic desires of the 

 friend of man: 



We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for 

 his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness 

 of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his 

 native gods and is admitted from time to time to a rare and 

 peculiar society with nature. He has glances of starry recog- 

 nition to which our salons are strangers. The steady illum- 

 ination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint 

 but satisfying light of the stars cctaipared with the dazzling 

 and shortlived blaze of candles. 



One evening when we had walked down to the beach 

 to gaze at the heavens and to speculate on the inhabi- 

 tants of the planets, we sat on our haunches, our feet 

 lapped by the warm tide, and for the first time I drew 

 our conversation to a man who in a brief friendship had 

 won the deep affection of this noble islander. 



"Ori-a-Ori," I began, *'in America, in the city where 

 I lived, my house was near a small aua, a park in which 

 was a Hi, a monument, to a great writer, a teller of tales 

 on paper. On a tall block of stone is a ship of gold, 

 with the sails spread ; so she seems to be sailing over the 

 ocean. The friends of the teller of tales built this tit 

 in his honor after he died. Now that writer was once 

 here in Tautira — " 



Ori-a-Ori leaned toward me, and in a voice laden with 

 memories, a voice that harked back over a quarter of a 

 century, said slowly and meditatively, but with surety: 



"Rui? Is the ship the Tatto?" 



I had awakened in his mind recollections, doubtless 

 often stirred, but very vague, perhaps, almost mythical 

 to him, after so long a time in which nothing like the 



