I began the day by bathing in the river with the year-old Tamaiti, Grelet’s child.  Her mother was Hinatiaiani, a laughing, beautiful girl of sixteen years, and the two were cared for by Pae, a woman of forty, ugly and childless.  Hinatiaiani was her adopted daughter, and Pae had been sorely angered when Grelet, whose companion she had been for eighteen years, took the girl.  But with the birth of Tamaiti, Pae became reconciled, and looked after the welfare of the infant more than the volatile young mother.

Tamaiti had never had a garment upon her sturdy small body, and looked a plump cherub as she played about the veranda, crawling in the puddles when the rain drove across the floor.

“The infant has never been sick,” Grelet had said.  “One afternoon I was starting for the river to bathe, when that girl was making herself a bed of cocoanut-leaves under the house.  She said she expected the baby, as, when she climbed a cocoanut-tree a moment earlier, she had felt a movement.  She would not lie in a bed, but, like her mother before her, must make her a nest of cocoanut-leaves.  When I returned from my bath, Tamaiti was born.  She was chopping wood next day—­the mother, I mean.”

Though scarcely a twelve-month old, the baby swam like a frog in the clear water of the river, gurgling at intervals scraps of what must have been Marquesan baby-talk, unintelligible to me, but showing plainly her enjoyment.  Something of European caution, however, still remained with me and, perhaps unnecessarily, I picked up the dripping little body and carried her up the garden path to the house when I returned for breakfast.  Pae received her with no concern, and gave her a piece of cocoanut to suck.  I saw the infant, clutching it in one hand, toddling and stumbling river-ward again when after breakfast I set out for a walk up Oomoa Valley.

Oomoa was far wilder than Atuona, more lonely, with hundreds of vacant paepaes.  Miles of land, once cultivated, had been taken again by the jungle, as estates lapsed to nature after thousands of years of man.  Still, even far from the houses, delicate trees had preserved themselves in some mysterious way, and oranges and limes offered themselves to me in the thickets.

The river that emptied into the bay below Grelet’s plantation flowed down the valley from the heights, and beside it ran the trail, a road for half a mile, then a track growing fainter with every mile, hardly distinguishable from the tangle of trees and bushes on either side.  Here and there I saw a native house built of bamboo and matting, very simple shelters with an open space for a doorway, but wholesome, clean, and, to me, beautiful.  I met no one, and most of the huts were on the other side of the river, but from one nearer the track a voice called to me, “Kaoha!  Manihii, a tata mai! Greeting, stranger, come to us!”

The hut, which, by measurement, was ten feet by six, held six women and girls, all lying at ease on piles of mats.  It was a rendezvous of gossips, a place for siestas and scandal.  One had seen and hailed me, and when I came to their paepae, they all filed out and surrounded me, gently and politely, but curiously.  Obviously they had seen few whites.