The six were from thirteen to twenty years of age, four of them strikingly beautiful, with the grace of wild animals and the bright, soft eyes of children.  Smiling and eager to be better acquainted with me, they examined my puttees of spiral wool, my pongee shirt, and khaki riding-breeches, the heavy seams of which they felt and discussed.  They discovered a tiny rip, and the eldest insisted that I take off the breeches while she sewed it.

As this was my one chance to prevent the rip growing into a gulf that would ultimately swallow the trousers, I permitted the stitch in time, and having nothing in my pockets for reward, I danced a jig.  I cannot dance a step or sing a note correctly, but in this archipelago I had won inter-island fame as a dancer of strange and amusing measures, and a singer of the queer songs of the whites.

Recalling the cake-walks, sand-sifting, pigeon-winging, and Juba-patting of the south, the sailor’s hornpipe, the sword-dance of the Scotch, and the metropolitan version of the tango, I did my best, while the thrilled air of Oomoa Valley echoed these words, yelled to my fullest lung capacity: 

  “There was an old soldier and he had a wooden leg,
   And he had no tobacco, so tobacco did he beg. 
   Said the soldier to the sailor, ‘Will you give me a chew?’
   Said the sailor to the soldier, ’I’ll be damned if I do! 
   Keep your mind on your number and your finger on your rocks,
   And you’ll always have tobacco in your old tobacco box.’”

Dancing and singing thus on the flat stones of the paepae of the six Fatu-hiva ladies, I gave back a thousand-fold their aid to my disordered trousers.  They laughed till they fell back on the rocks, they lifted the ends of their pareus to wipe their eyes, and they demanded an encore, which I obligingly gave them in a song I had kept in mind since boyhood.  It was about a young man who took his girl to a fancy ball, and afterward to a restaurant, and though he had but fifty cents and she said she was not hungry, she ate the menu from raw oysters to pousse-cafe, and turned it over for more.

It went with a Kerry jig that my grandfather used to do, and if grandfather, with his rare ability, ever drew more uproarious applause than I, it must have been a red-letter day for him, even in Ireland.  My hearers screamed in an agony of delight, and others dwelling far away, or passing laden with breadfruit and bananas, gathered while I chortled and leaped, and made the mountain-side ring with Marquesan bravos.

With difficulty I made my escape, but my success pursued me. “Menike haka!” came the cry from each house I passed, for the news had been called over the distance, and to the farthest reaches of the valley it was known that an American, the American who had come on the Roberta, with a box that wrote, was dancing along the route.