“‘I must say,’ sez the captain, ’you’re the most intelligent ’eathen I’ve seen in the ‘ole blooming run.’

“‘Eathen?’ sez ’Oward.  ’Me a ’eathen!  I was born in Iowa, and I’m a blooming good American.’”

“‘What, you an American citizen?’ sez the captain.  ’Born in my own state, and painted up like Sitting Bull on the warpath?  Get off this ship,’ sez ’e, wild, ’get off this ship, or I’ll put you in irons and take you back to the blooming jail you escaped from!’

“’Oward leaped over the side and swum ashore.”

An avenue ran the length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream.  Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae.  Two traders’ shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—­this was all that was left of former greatness.  Only nature had not changed.  It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower.  Man had almost ceased to be a figure in the scene he had dominated for untold centuries.

Crossing the stepping-stones of the brook we met a darkish, stout man in overalls.

“Good morn’,” he said pleasantly.  I looked at him and guessed his name at once.

“Good-morning,” I answered.  “You are the son of T’yonny.”

“My father, Mist’ Howard, dead,” he said.  “You Menike like him?”

Before I could answer something entered my ear and something my nose.  These somethings buzzed and bit fearsomely.  I coughed and sputtered.  An old woman on the bank was sitting in the smudge of a fire of cocoanut husks.  She was scratching her arms and legs, covered with angry red blotches.

“The nonos never stop biting,” she said in French.  These nonos are the dread sand-flies that Pere Victorien had run from to get some sleep in Atuona.  They are a kind of gadfly, red-hot needles on wings.

We sauntered along the road, tormented by the buzzing pests at which we constantly slapped and, crossing a tiny bridge over the brook, approached the Mission of Tai-o-hae, that once pompous and powerful center of the diffusion of the faith throughout the Marquesas.  The road was lined with guavas, mangos, cocoanuts, and tamarinds, all planted with precision and care.  The ambitious fathers who had begun these plantings scores of years before had provided the choicest fruits for their table.  All over the world the members of the great religious orders of Europe have carried the seeds of the best varieties of fruits and flowers, of trees and shrubs and vegetables; more than organized science they deserve the credit for introducing non-native species into all climes.

About the mission grounds was a stone wall, stout and fairly high, which had assured protection when orgies of indulgence in rum had made the natives brutal.  The clergy must survive if souls are to be saved.  Within the wall stood the church, the school, and a rambling rectory, all made beautiful by age and the artistry of tropical nature.  Mosses and lichens, mosaics of many shades of green, faint touches of red and yellow mould, covered the old walls which were fast decaying and falling to pieces.