“Horoa mai te pia!” “More beer!” they implored.

“Himene” said the inexorable master of the brew.

Up came the brass and the accordion, and forth went the inebriated strains.

Between their draughts of beer—­they drank always from the bottles—­the Tahitians often recurred to the song of Kelly.  Having no g, l, or s among the thirteen letters of their missionary-made alphabet, they pronounced the refrain as follows: 

    Hahrayrooyah!  I’m a boom!  Hahrayrooyah!  Boomagay! 
    Hahrayrooyah!  Hizzandow!  To tave ut fruh tin!

Landers being very big physically, they admired him greatly, and his company having been two generations in Tahiti, they knew his history.  They now and again called him by his name among Tahitians, “Taporo-Tane,” ("The Lime-Man"), and sang: 

    E aue Tau tiare ate e! 
    Ua parari te afata e! 
    I te Pahi no Taporo-Toue e!

    Alas! my dear, some one let slip
    A box of limes on the lime-man’s ship,
    And busted it so the juice did drip.

The song was a quarter of a century old and recorded an accident of loading a schooner.  Landers’s father’s partner was first named Taporo-Tane because he exported limes in large quantities from Tahiti to New Zealand.  The stevedores and roustabouts of the waterfront made ballads of happenings as their forefathers had chants of the fierce adventures of their constant warfare.  They were like the negroes, who from their first transplantation from Africa to America had put their plaints and mystification in strange and affecting threnodies and runes.

All through the incessant himenes a crowd of natives kept moving about a hundred feet away, dancing or listening with delight.  They would not obtrude on the feast, but must hear the music intimately.

The others of our party, having breakfasted until well after two, sought a house where Llewellyn was known.  McHenry and I followed the road which circles the island by the lagoon and sea-beach.  In that twelve leagues there are a succession of dales, ravines, falls precipices, and brooks, as picturesque as the landscape of a dream.  We walked only as far as Urufara, a mile or two, and stopped there at the camp of a Scotsman who offered accommodation of board and lodging.

His sketchy hotel and outhouses were dilapidated, but they were in the most beautiful surrounding conceivable, a sheltered cove of the lagoon where the swaying palms dipped their boles in the ultramarine, and bulky banana-plants and splendid breadfruit-trees formed a temple of shadow and coolth whence one might look straight up the lowering mountain-side to the ghostly domes, or across the radiant water to the white thread of reef.

We met McTavish, the host of the hotel, an aging planter, who kept his public house as an adjunct of his farm, and more for sociability than gain.  He was in a depressed and angry mood, for one of his eyes was closed, and the other battered about the rim and beginning to turn black and blue.