The water, about fifteen feet deep near the made embankment, was alive with the tiny fish, squirming in a mass as they were pursued by larger fish.  The son of Prince Hinoe, a round-shouldered lout, very tall, awkward, and merry, held a bamboo pole.  His white suit was soiled and ragged, and he whistled “All Coons Look alike to Me!” The peanut-vender had brought a rod, and was fishing with difficulty and mostly by feel.  He could keep one eye open only, as one hand was occupied, but he pulled in many ature.

The parc was the occasional assembling-place for the drifting whites made thoughtful by trolling the jolly, brown bowl, and by those to whom lack of francs denied the trolling.  It was there I first met Ivan Stroganoff, the aged Russian philosopher, and it was from there I took Wilfrid Baillon to the hospital.  Baillon was a very handsome cow-boy from British Columbia, and was housed in Papeete with a giant Scandinavian who owned a cattle ranch in South America.  He was generally called the Great Dane, and was the person meant in the charge for three cocktails at Lovaina’s:  “Germani to Fany, 3 feathers.”

The cow-boy became ill.  I prescribed castor-oil, and Mme. Fanny, half a tumbler of Martinique rum, with the juice of a lime in it.  She was famous for this remedy for all internal troubles, and I took one with the cowboy as a prophylactic, as I might have been exposed to the same germs.  He did not improve, though he followed Fanny’s regimen exactly.  He was sitting dejectedly in the parc, looking pale and thin, when I broached the subject.

“As the Fanny physic fails to straighten you out,” I said to him, “why not try the hospital?”

He recoiled.

“Have you ever lamped it?” he asked.  “It looks like a calaboose.”

“It ain’t so bad,” said Kelly, the I.W.W., who was proselyting as usual among the flotsam and jetsam of the waterfront.  “I ’ve been in worse joints in the United States.”

The cow-boy yielding, I escorted him to the institution, carrying his bag, as what with his disease and his antidote he was weak.  The hospital was a block away from the lagoon.  It was surrounded by a high stone wall, and as it was built by the military, it was ugly and had the ridiculous effrontery of the army and all its lack of common sense.  The iron gate was shut, and a sign said, “Sonnez s’il vous plait!” A toothless French portiere of thirty years let us in.  All the doctors of Tahiti had left the island for a few days on an excursion, and the gay scientist who opened the champagne in his pockets at the Tiare Hotel New Year’s eve was in command.  He sat in an arm-chair in a littered office and was smoking a pipe.  His beard had a diameter of a foot, and obviated any need of collar or shirt-band, for it grew from his shoulder-blades up, so that his forehead, eyes, nose, and lips were white islands in a black sea, and even his nose was not bare, for he had been debited by Lovaina for his champagne as “Hair on nose.”