I make you to know my great affection.  At the hour when you left us, I was filled with tears; my wife, Rui Telime, also, and all of my household.  When you embarked I felt a great sorrow.  It is for this that I went up on the road, and you looked from that ship, and I looked at you on the ship with great grief until you had raised the anchor and hoisted the sails.  When the ship started I ran along the beach to see you still; and when you were on the open sea I cried out to you, “Farewell, Louis”; and when I was coming back to my house I seemed to hear your voice crying, “Rui, farewell.”  Afterwards I watched the ship as long as I could until the night fell; and when it was dark I said to myself, “If I had wings I should fly to the ship to meet you, and to sleep amongst you, so that I might be able to come back to shore and to tell to Rui Telime, ‘I have slept upon the ship of Teriitera.’” After that we passed that night in the impatience of grief.  Towards eight o’clock I seemed to hear your voice, “Teriitera—­Rui—­here is the hour for putter and tiro (cheese and syrup).”  I did not sleep that night, thinking continually of you, my very dear friend, until the morning; being then still awake, I went to see Tapina Tutu on her bed, and alas, she was not there.  Afterwards I looked into your rooms; they did not please me as they used to do.  I did not hear your voice saying, “Hail, Rui”; I thought then that you had gone, and that you had left me.  Rising up, I went to the beach to see your ship, and I could not see it.  I wept, then, until the night, telling myself continually, “Teriitera returns into his own country and leaves his dear Rui in grief, so that I suffer for him, and weep for him.”  I will not forget you in my memory.  Here is the thought:  I desire to meet you again.  It is my dear Teriitera makes the only riches I desire in this world.  It is your eyes that I desire to see again.  It must be that your body and my body shall eat together at one table:  there is what would make my heart content.  But now we are separated.  May God be with you all.  May His word and His mercy go with you, so that you may be well and we also, according to the words of Paul.

The chief listened throughout the message with his eyes empty of us, conjuring a vision of the Rui who so far back had won his heart; and when Choti had concluded, Ori-a-Ori lifted his glass, and said, “Rui e Maru!” coupling me in his affection with the dim figure of his sweet guest of the late eighties.

The last toast was to my return.

“You have eaten the fei in Tahiti nei, and you will come back,” they chanted.

Raiere drove me in his cart to Taravao, where I had arranged for an automobile to meet me.  At Mataiea I was clasped to the bosom of Haamoura, and spent a few minutes with the Chevalier Tetuanui.  They could not understand us cold-blooded whites, who go long distances from loved ones.  My contemplated journey to the Marquesas Islands was to them a foolish and dangerous labor for no good reason.