“Rui gave me knives and forks and dishes from the schooner to remember him by,” said the chief, abstractedly.  “Tati, my relation, has them.  I have not those presents Rui handed me.  Tati said that I ate with my fingers, and that he was the head of the Teva clan; so I gave them to him.  Many papaa visit Tati at Papara.  He is rich.  Aue!  I have not the presents Rui put down on my table.”

I said over for him what Rui had written: 

I love the Polynesian; this civilization of ours is a dingy, ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much of that the very beauty of the poor beast ... if you could live, the only white folk, in a Polynesian village, and drink that warm, light vin du pays of human affection, and enjoy that simple dignity of all about you....

Paiere, the adopted son of Ori, who was a boy when the Casco was at Tautira, claimed a vivid remembrance of many incidents.  He especially had been impressed by the numbers of corks that flew in the house and on the green; and when I invited him to a bottle of champagne, he made hissing sounds and a plop to indicate that Rui had a penchant for that kind of wine.

“I used to fetch him oranges and mangoes, and climb for drinking nuts, of which Rui was fond,” said Paiere.

Paiere was a deacon or functionary of the Protestant church, as was Ori-a-Ori, and I went with the entire family to the Sunday evening service.  For weeks preparations and rehearsals for a himene nui, a mammoth song service, had been agitating the village.  Under my trees the children gathered of late afternoons and imitated the grown-up folk in their melodies.  From the verandas and from the church at night issued the peculiar strain of the himene, somehow bringing to me, lying on my mat under the stars, a sense of fitness to the prospect—­the clear heavens, the purple lagoon, the wind in the groves, and the low rumble of the surf.

On the Sunday of the himene nui, I met the French priest as he tied his horse by the door of the Catholic church.  He was in a dark cassock or gown, his long, black beard and a flat, half-melon shaped hat giving him a distinctive appearance in the simple settlement.  He was old, and weary from his hot ride, but courteous as world-wide travelers are, and at his request I dropped in on his service before the other.  He sat by the middle door, and the twenty or thirty of the congregation on the floor at one end.  They sang a himene, and he followed and corrected them from a book, so that their method was formal.  Congregational singing not being customary in Catholic churches, it was probable that in Tahiti they had had to meet the competition of the Protestants, who from their beginnings in Polynesia had made a master stroke by developing this form of worship in extraordinary consonance with the native mind.