The fei-hunters hang six or seven bunches on a bamboo pole and bring them thus to market.  One meets these young Atlases moving along the roads, chaplets of frangipani upon their curling hair, or perhaps a single gardenia or tube-rose behind their ears, singing softly and treading steadily, smiling, and all with a burden that would stagger a white athlete.

The taro looks like a war-club, several feet long, three inches thick, and with a fierce knob.  It and its tops are in demand.  The breadfruit are as big as Dutch cheese, weighing four or five pounds, their green rinds tuberculated like a golf-ball.  Sapadillos, tamarinds, limes, mangoes, oranges, acachous, and a dozen other native fruits are to be had.  Cocoanuts and papayas are of course, favorites.  There are many kinds of cocoanuts.  I like best the young nut, which has the meat yet unformed or barely so, and can be eaten with a spoon, and holds about a quart of delicious wine.  No matter how hot the day, this wine is always cool.  One has only to pierce the top of the green rind, and tilt the hole above one’s mouth.  If one has alcoholic leanings, the wine of a cocoanut, an ounce of rum, two lumps of sugar, a dash of grenadine, and the mixture were paradise enow.

The papayas, which the British call mammee-apple or even mummy-apple or papaw, because of the West Indian name, mamey, are much like pumpkins in appearance.  They grow on trees, quite like palms, from ten to thirty feet high, the trunk scaly like an alligator’s hide, and the leaves pointed.  The fruit hangs in a cluster at the crown of the tree, green and yellow, resembling badly shaped melons.  The taste is musky sweet and not always agreeable to tyros.  The seeds are black and full of pepsin.  Boiled when green, the papaya reminds one of vegetable marrow; and cooked when ripe, it makes a pie stuffing not to be despised.  I have often hung steaks or birds in the tree, protected by a cage from pests, or wrapped them in papaya-leaves to make them tender.  The very atmosphere does this, and the pepsin extracted from the papaya by science is much used by druggists instead of animal extracts.

The market closed, the venders who have come in carts drive home, while those Tahitians who are not too old adorn themselves with flowers and seek pleasure.  Young and old, they are laughing.  Why?  I need never ask the reason here, but look to the blue sky, the placid sea within the lagoon, the generous fruitage of nature, the palms and flowers ever present and inviting; the very sign of the gentle souls and merry hearts of these most lovable people.  When I am alone with them I do not walk.  I dance or skip.

Life is easy.  The fei, the breadfruit, the cocoanut, the mango, and the taro are all about.  No plow, no hoe, or rude labor, but for the lifting of one’s hand there is food.  The fish leap in the brine, and the pig fattens for the oven.  Clothes are irksome.  A straw hut may be built in an hour or two, and in the grove sounds the soft music of love.