He settled back upon the table, and became immersed again in reverie.  On the floor by the kitchen was a Tahitian woman with a baby and a pandanus-basket of varos.  They squirmed and wriggled, contorted and crackled like giant thousand-legs, and almost excited in me a repulsion.

The vahine laughed at me.

“I fished for them with a dozen grapnels,” she said.  “It was good fishing to-day.  I put a piece of fish on each group of hooks.  You know those holes are very small at the top and under two or three feet of water.  Not many know how to find them.  I set a grapnel in each hole, and then returned to the first to pull out the varo.  I have more than twenty here.”

Butscher rose, and sluggishly began to prepare the breakfast.  He wrapped the varos in hotu-leaves, and put them in the umu to steam on the red-hot stones, and began to open oysters and fry fish in brown butter, as Tatini and I hastened to the beach for a bath.  The sea was studded with coral growth, and sponges by the thousand, and we sat on these soft cushions under the surface, and watched the little fishes’ antics, and chatted.  Tatini had gathered half a dozen nono, a fruit that has a smooth skin and no stone, and she threw them at me.

“Do you know about the nono?” she asked merrily.  “It was in our courtship.  When a crowd of young men were gathered to bathe in the pools or to lie on the banks under the shade of the trees, suddenly a missile struck one of them on the shoulder.  The others began to shout at him and to sing, for it was a sign that a vahine had chosen him.  He jumped to his feet and ran in the direction of the hidden thrower, and she ran, too, but no farther than away from the eyes of the others.”

“Tatini,” I said, “the nono was the Tahitian arrow of a little fat god we have called Cupid.”

“Aue!” she replied.  “It was not always oaoa for him, because it might be an old woman, or some one he did not like, but who loved him.  The Arii, the aristocratic ladies, no matter how old, threw nono at the youngest and handsomest youth, and they had to pursue them, because of good manners.  You know, Maru, that an illegitimate child is called to-day taoranono, and taora means to throw.”

“When I was in Hawaii,” I told her, “the old natives used to talk of a game there which, under King Kalakaua, their next to last sovereign, was played at night in Iolani palace or in the garden, but a ball of twine took the place of the nono, and all stood about, men and women, in a circle, to speed and receive the token of passion.  The missionaries severely condemned the game.”

At the Maison des varos I breakfasted alone, for Tatini was too shy to break the taboo that separated the sexes at meals.  Butscher waited on me, bringing one plate of ambrosia after another—­oysters, shrimp, varos, and fish.  I warmed his frigid blood with a cup or two of Pol Roger, 1905, a bottle of which he dragged from a cave.