“If you go to Takaroa,” said Woronick, “be sure to see old Tepeva a Tepeva.  He used to be one of the best divers in the Low Islands, but he’s got the bends.  He sold me the greatest pearl ever found in these fisheries in the last twenty years, and I made enough profit on it to buy a house in Paris and live a year.  Get him to tell you his yarn.  It beats Monte Cristo all hollow.”

Which I made a note to do.

In the afternoon, with Charlie Eager, a guest at the Annexe, I went to the worship-place of the Chinese, on the Broom Road.  Outwardly, it had not the flaunting distinction of the joss-houses of the Far East or those of New York or San Francisco.  The Chinese usually builds his temples even in foreign lands in the same Oriental superfluity of color and curve and adornment that makes them exclusively the Middle Kingdom’s own; but here he had been content to have a simple, whitewashed church which might be a meeting-house or school.  It was set in the center of a great garden in which mango and cocoa and breadfruit abounded.  We were struck by the superb breadth and immense height of a breadfruit-tree the shadows of which fell over a small brick pagoda.  This tree was a hundred feet tall, and the always glorious leaves, as large as aprons, indented and a glossy, dark green, made it a temple in itself worthier of the ministrations of priests than the ugly brick or frame structure of our cities.  The Druids in their groves were nearer to the real God than the pursy bishop in the steam-heated cathedral.

A native woman, aged and bent, said “Ia ora na!” to us, and we replied.  With my few words of Tahitian I gained from her that the joss-house was open.  We entered it, and found no one there.  The center was wide to the sky, that the rain might fall and the stars shine within it.  The altars were brilliant with memorial tablets, the green, red, and gold flower vases, and sandalwood taper-holders, so familiar to me, and all about were the written prayers of devotees, soliciting the favor of Heaven, asking success in business, or the averting of illness.  They were evidently painted by the bonze of the fane, for his slab of India ink was on a table nearby, as also the brushes for the ideographs.

Sons expressed their filial duties in glittering excerpts from Confucius, carved and gilded on expansive boards, and the incense of the poor arose from the humble punksticks stuck in dishes of sand upon the floor.

No Levite sat within the shrine or watched to see if profane hand touched the sacred symbols, and were Charlie Eager sure of that before we left, he had secured a trophy.  Not knowing but that from one of the numerous crannies or mayhap from the open roof the wrathful eye of a hierophant was upon him, he had to content himself with a prayer from the pagoda, which proved on close inspection to be a furnace for the burning of the paper slips on which the aspirations of the faithful were written.  Whether the prayers had been granted, were out of date, or the time paid for hanging in the joss-house had expired, the crematory was four feet deep with the red and white rice-paper legends, awaiting an auspicious occasion for incineration.  Eager of Inglewood, California, fished secretly, hidden by my body, until he found a particularly long and intricate set of hieroglyphics, and deposited it in his pocket.  Then we fled.