The lilies, oranges, and pandanus trees yielded food for the bees, whose thatched homes stood thick on the hillside above the house.  Grelet was a skilled apiarist, and replenished his melliferous flocks by wild swarms enticed from the forests.  The honey he strained and bottled, and it was sought of him by messengers from all the islands.

Orchard and garden beyond the house gave us Valencia and Mandarin oranges, lemons, feis, Guinea cherries, pineapples, Barbadoes cherries, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes, watermelons, cantaloups, Chile peppers, and pumpkins.  Watercress came fresh from the river.

Cows and goats browsed about the garden, but Grelet banned pigs to a secluded valley to run wild.  One of the cows was twenty-two years old, but daily gave brimming buckets of milk for our refreshment.  Beef and fish, breadfruit and taro, good bread from American flour, rum, and wine both red and white, with bowls of milk and green cocoanuts, were always on the table, a box of cigars, packages of the veritable Scaferlati Superieur tobacco, and the Job papers, and a dozen pipes.  No king could fare more royally than this Swiss, who during twenty years had never left the forgotten little island of Fatu-hiva.

His house, set in this bower of greenery, of flowers and perfumes, was airy and neat, whitewashed both inside and out, with a broad veranda painted black.  Two bedrooms, a storeroom in which he sold his merchandise, and a workroom, sufficed for all his needs.  The veranda was living-room and dining-room; raised ten feet from the earth on breadfruit-tree pillars placed on stone, it provided a roof for his forge, for his saddle-and-bridle room, and for the small kitchen.

The ceilings in the house were of wood, but on the veranda he had cleverly hung a canvas a foot below the roof.  The air circulated above it, bellying it out like a sail and making the atmosphere cool.  Under this was his dining-table, near a very handsome buffet, both made by Grelet of the false ebony, for he was a good carpenter as he was a crack boatsman, farmer, cowboy, and hunter.  Here we sat over pipe and cigarette after dinner, wine at our elbows, the garden before us, and discussed many things.

Grelet had innumerable books in French and German, all the great authors old and modern; he took the important reviews of Germany and France, and several newspapers.  He knew much more than I of history past and present, of the happenings in the great world, art and music and invention, finances and politics.  He could name the cabinets of Europe, the characters and records of their members, or discuss the quality of Caruso’s voice as compared with Jean de Reszke’s, though he had heard neither.  Twenty-two years ago he had left everything called civilization, he had never been out of the Marquesas since that time; he lived in a lonely valley in which there was no other man of his tastes and education, and he was content.