Happiness in civilization consists in seeing life other than it really is.  At Mataiea the simple truth of existence was joy.  In the house of the chief, Tetuanui, I knew a peace of mind and body as novel to me as my surroundings.  For the first time since unconcerned childhood I felt my heart leap in my bosom when the dawn awoke me, and was glad merely that I could see the sun rise or the rain fall.  All of us have had that feeling on certain mornings; but was it not interwoven with the affairs of the day—­a picnic, a rendezvous, our wedding, a first morning of the vacation encampment?  In Mataiea it was spontaneous, the harking back to a beneficent mood of nature; the very sense of being stirring the blood in delight, and girding up the loins instantly to pleasurable movement.

I slept without clothing, and in a bound was at the door, with my pareu about me.  Already the family had begun the leisurely tasks of the day.  The fowls were on the sward under the breadfruit and papaya-trees, and the mina-birds were swooping down on the grass near them to profit by their uncovering of food.  Those discriminating birds are like the Japanese, seldom pioneering in wild places, but settling on developed lands to gain by the slower industry of other peoples.  “Birds that live on cows,” the Tahitians call the minas, because where there are enough ruminants each bird selects one, and spends the day upon its back, eating the insects that infest its skin.

The sun at six barely lit the beach and revealed the lagoon, into which a stream from the mountains poured within Tetuanui’s confines.  I threw off my garment and plunged into a pool under a clump of pandanus-trees.  It was cool enough at that hour to give the surface nerves the slight shock I craved, but warmed as I lay in the limpid water and watched the light sweeping past the reef in the swift way of the tropics.

I danced upon the beach and pursued the land crabs to their burrows.  I hoped to see one wrench off a leg to prove what I had been told—­that if one in its movement to the salt water through the tall grass beyond the sand, touched any filth, it clawed off the polluted leg, and that a crab had been seen thus to deprive itself of all its eight limbs, and after a bath to hobble back to its hole with the aid of its claws, to remain until it had grown a complement of supports.  I wondered why it did not content itself with washing instead of mutilation.  To the biblical expounder it was an apt illustration of “cutting off an offending member,” as recommended in the Book.

At the house the family were preparing their first meal, and I shared it with them—­oranges, bananas, coffee, and rolls.  The last, with the New Zealand tinned butter, came from the Chinese store.  We sat on mats, and we drank from small bowls.  The coffee was sweetened with their own brown sugar, and the juice of nearly ripe cocoanuts, grated and pressed, made a delicious substitute for cream.