Afa returned from America to find that much of his father’s property had been stolen or claimed by others, and he became a cook and servant.  He had been many years with Lovaina, and though he owned valuable land, he preferred the hotel life, half domestic, half manager and confidant, to the quietude of the country.  In Afa’s single room were two brass bedsteads, many gaudy tidies, an engraving of the execution of Nathan Hale, and a toilet-table full of fancy notions.  Evoa was always barefooted, but Afa, on steamer days and when going to the cinematograph, appeared in immaculate white and with canvas shoes.  Otherwise he wore only a fold of cloth about the loins, the real garment of the Tahitian, and the right one for that climate.

Again on my balcony, I saw the sun had passed the crown of the Diadem and was slanting hotly toward Papeete.  Moorea was emerging from darkness, its valleys a deep brown, and the tops of the serried mountains becoming green.

Along the reef, outside, a schooner, two-masted, was making for the harbor.  She was very graceful, and as she entered the lagoon through the passage in the barrier I was struck by her lines, slender, swelling, and feminine.  She passed within a few hundred feet of me, and I saw that she was the Marara, the Flying-Fish.

I did not know it then, but I was to go on that little vessel to the blazing atolls of the Dangerous Archipelago, and to see stranger and more fascinating sights than I had dreamed of on the Noa-Noa during my passage to Tahiti.

I dragged my canoe to the edge of the quai des Subsistances, so-called because of the naval depot.  The craft was dubbed out of a breadfruit-tree trunk, and had an outrigger of purau wood, a natural crooked arm, with a small limb laced to it.  The canoe was steady enough in such smooth water, and I paddled off to Motu Uta.  That islet is a rock of coral upon which soil had been placed unknown years before, and which produced fruits and flowers in abundance under the hand of the caretaker.  Motu Uta is about as large as a city building lot, and the coral hummock shelves sharply to a considerable depth.  Under this declining reef were the rarest shapes and colors of fish.  They swam up and down, and in and out of their blue and pink and ivory-colored homes, slowly and majestically, or darting hither and thither, angered at the intrusion of my canoe in their domain, courting and rubbing fins, repelling invaders.  The little ones avoiding dexterously the appetites of their big friends, and these moving pompously, but warily, seeking what they might devour.