In a delta formed by the Vaitapiha the settlement lay among tents of verdure.  For a mile it sprawled around a small point of land which thrust out into the sea, and which was guarded by the most wonderful of walls, a reef of madrepore, as solid as granite and sixty feet wide.  The road was arched by splendid trees of many kinds, and facing it, every several hundred feet, was a home.  Many of these were cottages in modern style, but a dozen or so were the true Tahitian fare, of bamboo and thatch.  All were covered with flowering vines, and surrounded by many fruiting trees.

“Tautira nei!” announced my coachman.  “Tautira is here!”

He pulled up the horse.  I had not given any thought to my lodging, and I jumped out and looked around.  The brook curved about a mango grove, and under its high trees was a new native house, a replica of the commodious dwellings of old days.  I walked into the grove, and was admiring the careful, but charming, arrangements of ferns and orchids, which, though brought from the forests, had been fitted into the scene to simulate a natural environment.  All of a sudden a something I could not see hurled itself from a limb upon my head, and two affrighting paws seized my right ear and my hair, grown long at Mataiea, and tried to tear them out by the roots, while at the same time many fierce teeth closed, though without much effect, on my tough and weathered shoulder.  In horror at the attack, I covered yards in two bounds, and my assailant was torn from its hold upon me.

I then turned and saw that it was a monkey tied to a rope fastened to the limb of the tree.  He stood upright on the ground, his jaws agape, and a look of devilish glee upon his uncannily manlike face.  At the same moment a white man ran from the house and called in English: 

“You damned little scoundrel!  How often have I whipped you for that same trick!  I would better have left you in the slums in San Francisco.”

And then apologetically to me: 

“I ought to kill him for that.  He’s a devil, that monkey.  He has bitten all the children around here, has killed all my chickens, and raised more hell in this village than the whole population put together.  I swear, I believe he just enjoys being mean.  Come in and have a snifter after that greeting!  Did he hurt you?”

My would-be host was himself a very striking somebody.  He wore only a pareu, as I, of scarlet muslin, with the William Morris design, but he had wound his about so that it was a mere ornamental triangle upon his tall, powerful, statuesque body.  His chest and back had a growth of red-gold hair, which, with his bronzed skin, his red-gold beard, dark curls over a high forehead, handsome nose, and blue eyes, made him all of the same color scheme.  He was without doubt as near to a Greek deity in life, a Dionysus, as one could imagine.  He had two flaming hibiscus blossoms over his ears, and he looked in his late twenties.  Accustomed as I was to semi-nudity and to white men’s return to nature, I had never seen a man who so well fitted into the landscape as the owner of the ape.  He was the faun to the curling locks and the pointed ears, with not a trace of the satyr; all youth and grace and radiance.