and brown, of the flirtations of tourists, of the Government’s issuing an ultimatum on the price of fish, of how the consuls quarreled at a club dinner, and of how one threw three ribs of roasted beef at the other, who retorted with a whole sucking pig just from the native oven, of Thomas’ wife leaving him for Europe after a month’s honeymoon; and all the flotsam and jetsam of report and rumor, of joke and detraction, which in an island with only one mail a month are the topics of interest.

The porch was the clearing-house and the casual, oral record of the spreading South Seas.  It was the strangest salon of any capital, and Lovaina the most fascinating of hostesses.  Stories that would be frowned down in many a man’s club were laughed at lightly over the table, but not when tourists, new-comers, were present.  Then the dignified Lovaina, repressing the oaths of potvaliant skippers, putting her finger to her lips when a bald assertion was imminent, said impressively: 

“That swears don’t go!  What you think?  To give bad name my good house?”

Only when old-timers were gathered, between steamships, when the schooners came in a drove from the Paumotu atolls, and gold and silver rang on the table at all hours, there was little restraint.

With only one mail a month to disturb the monotony, and but trifling interest in anything north of the equator except prices of their commodities, these unrepressed rebels against the conventions and even the laws of the Occident must have their fling.  On that camphor-wood chest had sat many a church-going woman and dignified man of Europe or America, resident for a month or longer in Tahiti, and shuddered at what they heard—­shuddered and listened, eager to hear those curious incidents and astonishing opinions about life and affairs, and to mark the difference between this and their own countries.  It was without even comment that people who at home or among the conventions would be shocked at the subjects or their treatment, in these islands listened thrilled or chucklingly to stories as naked as the children.  Double entendre is caviar to the average man and woman of Tahiti, who call the unshrouded spade by its aboriginal name.  The Tahitians were ever thus, and the French have not sought to correct their ways.  I heard Atupu, one of the girls of the hotel, in a Rabelaisian passage of wit the while she opened Seattle beer for thirsty Britishers, old residents, traders, and planters.  One could not publish the phrases if one could translate them.

Lovaina, in her bed just off the porch, was laughing at the retorts of Atupu, who by her native knowledge of the tongue was discomfiting the roisterers, who spoke it haltingly.  I heard an apt interjection on the part of the proprietress which set them all roaring, and so lowered their self-esteem that they left summarily.

One day when I was hurrying off to swim in the lagoon, I asked Lovaina to guard a considerable sum of money in bank-notes.  She assented readily, but when several days later I mentioned the money she struck her head in alarm.  She thought and thought, but could not remember in what safe place she had hidden the paper francs.