All the east is purple and red, gorgeous, flaring, when I awake.  There are no windows in my connecting rooms in the Annexe.  The sun rises through their wallless front, and sets through their opening to the balcony.  What more liberal dispensation of nature?  I am under the shower in two minutes, long enough to go down the curved staircase, with its admirable rosewood balustrade, and through the rear veranda to the room in which the large cement basin serves for bath and laundry and to lend a minute to the Christchurch Kid, the prize-fighter, to inform me that he is to open a school of the manly art, with diplomas for finished scholars and rewards for excellence.  The recitals are to be public, a fee charged, and all ambitious pupils are to be guaranteed open examination in pairs and a just decision.  The Kid and Cowan are to be hors de combat.

A daughter of a French governor of the Low Archipelago is in the basin, the door ajar, and the spray blinding her to my presence.  She is seventeen, cafe au lait—­beaucoup de lait, kohl-eyed, meter-tressed, and slim-bodied.  She sings the himene of the battle of the limes and coal and potatoes, with a new stanza concerning the return of the Noa-Noa, and the vengeance of the Tahitian braves upon the pigs of Peretania, Britain.

“Ia or a na!  Bonjour, Goo’ night!” she says impartially, and modestly slips her pareu about her.

“Ia ora na oe!” I reply.  “All goes well?”

“By cripe’ yais; dam’ goo’!” she answers, and goes humming on her way to her shanty in the yard.  She is the maid of my chamber, gentle, willing, but never to be found for service.  She learns English from the Kid, the rubber-legged boot-black, and other gentleman adventurers and tars of America and Europe, and she pours out bad words—­I cannot mention them—­in innocent faith in their propriety.  In French or Tahitian she speaks correctly.

Outside the bath I hear the vehicles hurrying to market, and dressing quickly in white drill, and wearing on my Paumotu hat a brilliant scarlet pugaree, once the badge of subjugation to the Mohammedan conquerors of India, I join the procession.

Bon dieu! what a morning!  The reds and purples are dying in the orient, and the hills are swathed in the half-white light of day.  The lagoon is now a glistening pearly gray.  Moorea, the isle of the fairy folk, is jagged and rough, as if a new throe of earth had torn its heights and made new steeps and obelisks.  Moorea is never the same.  Every hour of the day and every smile and frown of the sun creates valleys and spires, and alters the outlines of this most capricious of islets.