“I hear they’re nutty on prizefighting like in Tahiti, and I’ll teach ’em boxing,” he explained.

The Marquesan ladies who speedily assembled could not take their eyes from him.  They asked me a score of questions about him, and were not surprised that I knew him, or even that I called the negro by name when he sauntered up.  We must all be from the same valley, or at least from the same island, they thought, for were we not all Americans?

I kept Broken Bronck to luncheon, and gave him what few household furnishings I had not promised to Exploding Eggs or to Apporo, who with the promise of the Golden Bed about to be realized—­for I announced my going—­camped upon it, hardly believing that at last she was to own the coveted marvel.  Some keepsakes I gave to Malicious Gossip, Mouth of God, Many Daughters, Water, Titihuti, and others, and drank a last shell of namu with these friends.

News of my packing reached far and wide.  I had not estimated so optimistically the esteem in which they held me, these companions of many months, but they trooped from the farthest hills to say farewell.  Good-byes even to the sons and daughters of cannibals are sorrowful.  I had come to think much of these simple, savage neighbors.  Some of them I shall never forget.

Mauitetai, a middle-aged woman with a kindly face, was long on my paepae.  Her name would be in English My Darling Hope, and it well fitted her mood, for she was all aglow with wonder and joy at receiving a letter from her son, who three years before had gone upon a ship and disappeared from her ken.  The letter had come upon the Saint Francois, and it brought My Darling Hope into intimate relations with me, for I uncovered to her that her wandering boy had become a resident of my own country, and revealed some of the mysteries of our polity.

The letter was in Marquesan, which I translate into English, seeking to keep the flavor of the original, though poorly succeeding: 

  “I write to you, me, Pahorai Calizte, and put on this paper
  greetings to you, my mother, Mauitetai, who are in Atuona.

  “Kaoha nui tuu kui, Mauitetai, mother of me.  Great love to you.

  “I have found in Philadelphia work for me; good work.

“I have found a woman for me.  She is Jeanette, an artist, a maker of tattooings on cloth.  I am very happy.  I have found a house to live in.  I am happy I have this woman.  She is rich.  I am poor.  It is for that I write to you, to make it known to you that she is rich, and I am poor.  By this paper you will know that I have pledged my word to this woman.  I found her and I won her by my work and by my strength and my endeavor.

“She is moi kanahau; as beautiful as the flowers of the hutu in my own beloved valley of Atuona.  She is not of America.  She is of Chile.  She has paid many piasters for the coming here.  She has paid forty piasters.  She has been at home in Las Palmas, in the islands of small golden birds.

  “I will write you more in this paper.  I seek your permission to
  marry Jeanette.  She asks it, as I do.  Send me your word by the
  government that carries words on paper.