“Eh bien,” he said to my question, “I will tell you.  I was married first at sixteen years of age and this is my third wife.”  He pointed over his shoulder to a tow-headed German for all I could see, and who certainly showed no sign of the native except in her dress and manners and avoirdupois.

“My first wife died,” continued the arii, contemplatively.  “I divorced the second, and the third is just now eating the first dejeuner in that room.  I have eight children, and will have twenty, and I am the chief of the Papenoo district, but this is not the place of my ancienne famille.  I was appointed here by the French Governor three years ago to administer the district, which needed a strong hand.  I like it, and have bought land and built this house.  I will stay my days here.  There is the farehau, the administration building where I meet the people and we have conferences.”

He pointed to a wooden cottage near by, with what looked like a dancing-pavilion attached.  There the people come to squat upon the floor and relate their grievances.  Most of the disputes before minor and major courts were over land and water rights.

It was half past seven o’clock when we inspanned for the trek to Papeete, a balmy, brilliant morning.  The banks and cliffs were masses of ferns, the living imposed upon the dead, and hibiscus and gardenias and clumps of bamboo in a dissolving pageant mingled with plots of taro and yams, pineapples and bananas.  The majestic bread trees and the spreading mangoes, the latter with their fruit verging from gold to russet, were surflnounted by the soaring cocoanuts, the monarchs of the tropics, whose banners fly from every atoll, and fall only before the most terrible might of the King of Storms.

A cocoanut-palm bears at eight years and when about twenty-five feet high.  It rises seventy or eighty feet, and has a hundred curves.  It is the wily creature of the winds, but outwits them in all but their worst moods.  To the tropical man the cocoa-palm is life and luxury.  He drinks the milk and eats the meat, or sells it dried for making soaps and emollients and other things; the oil he lights his house with and rubs upon his body to assuage pain; he builds his houses and wharves of it, and thatches his home with the husks, which also serve for fuel, fiber for lines and dresses and hats, leaves for canoe-sails and the shell of the nut for his goblet.  Its roots he fashions into household utensils.  The cocoa grows where other edibles perish.  It dips its bole in the salt tide, and will not thrive removed from its beloved sea.

To me there is an inexpressible sentiment in the presence of these cocoa-palms.  They are the symbol of the simplicity and singleness of the eternal summer of the tropics; the staff and gonfalons of the dominion of the sun.  My heart leaps at their sight when long away.  They are the dearest result of seed and earth.  I drink their wine and esteem dwelling in their sight a rare communion with the best of nature.