All the foregoing was brought out in our conversation at the British consul’s.  Willi, temporarily conducting American affairs in French Oceanie, gave a denouement.

“The shine isn’t a bad fellow,” he said, “but he’s serious about the twenty thousand dollars.  His statement was doubted to-day by an English sailor, who called him ‘a blarsted Hamerican liar,’ and the shine took off his own rubber leg, and knocked the sailor down.  He could move faster on his one leg than the other on two, and Monsieur Lontane had to summon two assistants to take him to the calaboose.  He wouldn’t resume his rubber leg.  I saw him being led and pulled by my office, calling out, ’Tell the ’Merican consul a good American is in the grip of the frogs.’”

Within a month of the rubber-legged shiner’s debut, there were two other boot-blacks on the streets.  A madness possessed the people, Tahitians and French, who all their lives had cleaned their own shoes, to sit on the throne-like chairs, and women and girls waited their turns.  John Conroy and a negro from Mississippi were the additions to the profession, and during the incarceration of the premier artist, his sweetheart, a former hula danseuse, remained faithful to his brushes.  When a shoeless man or woman regarded the new-fangled importations interestedly, the proprietors offered to beautify their naked feet, and, ridiculous as it may seem, attempted it.

Although I heard odd tales at the consulate, it was at the parc de Bougainville that I met the gentleman of the beach intimately.

There I often sat and talked with whomever loafed.  Natives frequented the parc hardly ever, but beach-combers, tourists, and sailors, or casual residents in from the districts, awaited there the opening of the stores or the post-office, or idled.  The little park, or wooded strip of green, named after the admiral, and containing his monument, skirted the quay, and was between the establishment of Emile Levy, the pearl-trader, and the artificial pool of fresh water where the native women and sailors off the ships washed their clothes.  From one’s bench one had a view of all the harbor and of the passers-by on the Broom Road.

In the morning the pool was thronged with the laundresses, and one heard their paddles chunking as they beat the clothes.  The French warship, the Zelee, was moored close by, and often the linen of its crew hung upon lines in the parc, and the French sailors came and went upon their duties, or sat on the coral wall and smoked and sang chansons.  In the afternoon horses were brought down to bathe, and guests of the Annexe swam in the lagoon.  People afoot, driving carts or carriages, on bicycles and in automobiles, went by on the thoroughfare about the island, the Frenchmen always talking as if excited over cosmic affairs, and the natives laughing or calling to one another.

If there happened to be a shoal of fish near the quays, I was sure to see Joseph, to whom the wise Dr. Funk had confided his precious concoction.  He would desert the Cercle Bougainville, but still within hail of a stentorious skipper whose coppers were dry, and with a dozen other native men and women, boys and girls, lure the fish with hooks baited with bits of salted shrimp.  Joseph was as skilful with his rod as with a shaker, and he would catch twenty ature, four or five inches long, in half an hour.