Thoreau’s “Cry of the Human” echoed in the dark as the chief and I chanted the idealistic desires of the friend of man: 

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement.  By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature.  He has glances of starry recognition to which our salons are strangers.  The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling and shortlived blaze of candles.

One evening when we had walked down to the beach to gaze at the heavens and to speculate on the inhabitants of the planets, we sat on our haunches, our feet lapped by the warm tide, and for the first time I drew our conversation to a man who in a brief friendship had won the deep affection of this noble islander.

“Ori-a-Ori,” I began, “in America, in the city where I lived, my house was near a small aua, a park in which was a tii, a monument, to a great writer, a teller of tales on paper.  On a tall block of stone is a ship of gold, with the sails spread; so she seems to be sailing over the ocean.  The friends of the teller of tales built this in in his honor after he died.  Now that writer was once here in Tautira—­”

Ori-a-Ori leaned toward me, and in a voice laden with memories, a voice that harked back over a quarter of a century, said slowly and meditatively, but with surety: 

“Rui?  Is the ship the Tatto?”

I had awakened in his mind recollections, doubtless often stirred, but very vague, perhaps, almost mythical to him, after so long a time in which nothing like the same experience had come to him.  Yet that they were dear to him was evident.  They were concerned with his vigorous manhood, though he was a youthful grandfather when the Casco brought Robert Louis Stevenson to Tahiti to live in the house of Ori.  I reminded him of their exchanging names in blood brothership, so that Stevenson was Teriitera, and Ori was Rui.  Rui was his pronunciation of Louis, as all his family in Tautira called the Scotch author.  Ori-a-Ori had known them all, his mother, his wife, and his loved stepson, Lloyd Osborne.  Nine weeks they had stayed in his house, which the Princess Moe, Pomare’s sister-in-law, had asked Ori to vacate for the visitors before he knew them, but which he was glad he had done when they became friends.  Ori and his family had retained only one room for their intimate effects, and had slept in a native house on the site of my own.  On the wild lawn across the road, before his home, Rui had given his generous feast, costing him eighty dollars at a time when he was most uncertain of funds, and gaining him the reputation of the richest man known to the Tautirans, the owner of the Silver Ship, as the Casco was called by the Paumotuans, and by Stevenson afterward.  There were four or five Tahitians I knew here who remembered the amuraa maa of the sick man, who had his own schooner, his pahi tira piti; but only Ori retained the deep, though misty, impression made by a meeting of hearts in warmest kinship.