Lee and I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and passing many sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.

After a considerable walk through a thrifty plantation, we were in front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste.  At the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in gold-rimmed eye-glasses and a red breechclout.  His well-shaped, bald head and punctilious manner would have commanded attention in any attire.

I was introduced to Monsieur Francois Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never been farther away than a few miles.  Not even Tahiti had drawn him to it.  Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he had dwelt contentedly in Oomoa.

After we had chatted for a few moments he invited me to be his guest.  I thought of the Roberta and those two kinds of cockroaches, the Blatta orientalis and the Blatta germanica, who raid by night and by day respectively; I looked at Grelet’s surroundings, and I accepted.  While the Roberta gathered what copra she could and flitted, I became a resident of Oomoa until such time as chance should give me passage to my own island.

Twenty years before my host had planted the trees that embowered his home.  With the Swiss farmer’s love of order, he had neglected nothing to make neat, as nature had made beautiful, his surroundings.

“I learned agriculture and dairying on my father’s farm in Switzerland,” said Grelet.  “At school I learned more of their theory, and when I had seen the gay cities of Europe, I went to the new world to live.  I was first at Pecos City, New Mexico, where I had several hundred acres’ of government land.  I brought grape-vines from Fresno, in California, but the water was insufficient for the sterile soil, and I was forced to give up my land.  From San Francisco I sailed on the brig Galilee for Tahiti.  I have never finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left her and installed myself on the Eunice, a small trading-schooner, and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land and settled down here.”

Grelet looked about him and smiled.

“It isn’t bad, hein?”

It was not.  From the little cove where his boat-house stood a road swept windingly to his house through a garden of luxuriant verdure.  Mango and limes, breadfruit and cocoanut, pomme de Cythere, orange and papaws, banana and alligator-pear, candlenut and chestnut, mulberry and sandalwood, tou, the bastard ebony, and rosewood, the rose-apple with purple tasseled flowers and delicious fruit, the pistachio and the badamier, scores of shrubs and bushes and magnificent tree-ferns, all on a tangled sward of white spider-lilies, great, sweet-smelling plants, an acre of them, and with them other ferns of many kinds, and mosses, the nodding taro leaves and the ti, the leaves which the Fatu-hivans make into girdles and wreaths; all grew luxuriantly, friendly neighbors to the Swiss, set there by him or volunteering for service in the generous way of the tropics.