For all time, they said, this had been the center of life in Vait-hua.  Old wives’ tales had been told here for generations.  The whalers filled their casks at this spring, working every hour of the twenty-four because the flow was small.  Famous harpooners, steersmen who winked no eye when the wounded whale drew their boat through a smother of foam, shanghaied gentlemen, sweepings of harbors, Nantucket deacons, pirates, and the whole breed of sailors and fighting fellows, congregated here to bathe and to fill their water-casks.  Near this crystal rivulet they slashed each other in their quarrels over Vait-hua’s fairest, and exchanged their slop-chest luxuries and grog for the favors of the island chiefs.

It was Standard Oil, sending around the world its tipoti, or tin cans, filled with illuminating fluid cheaper than that of the whale, that ended the days of the ships in Vait-hua, and they sailed away for the last time, leaving an island so depopulated that its few remaining people could slip back into the life of the days before the whites came.

“Alice Snow las’ whaleship come Vait-hua six years before,” said the Seventh Man Who Wallows.  “Before that, one ship, California name, Captain Andrew Hicks.  Charlie, he sailmaker, run away from Andrew Hicks.  One Vait-hua girl look good to him.  She hide him in hills till captain make finish chase him.  That him children.”

Indeed, most of the faces turned toward me from the group about the spring were European, either by recent heredity or tribal nature.  I could see the Saxon, the Latin, and the Viking, and one girl was all Japanese, a reference to which caused her to weep.  “Iapona” was to her pretty ears the meanest word in Vait-hua’s vocabulary, and her playmates held it in reserve for important disagreements.

Vanquished Often, slipping from her white tunic, stepped beneath the stream of crystal water and laughed at the cool delight of it on her smooth skin.  It was a picture of which artist’s dream, the naked girl laughing in the torrents of transparent water, the wet crimson blossoms washing from her drowned hair, and beneath the striped shade of the palm-trunks her simple, savage companions waiting their turn, squatting on the sand or crowded on the canoe, their loins wrapped in crimson and blue and yellow pareus.  Behind them all the mountains rose steeply, a mass of brilliant green jungle growth, and before them, across the rim of shining white sand, spread the wide blue sea.

Courtesy suggested that I should be next to feel the refreshing torrent.  We let slip the garment of timorous covering very easily when nudity is commonplace.  Vait-hua was to teach me to be modest without pother, to chat with those about me during my ablutions without concern for the false vanities of screens or even the shelter of rocks as in the river in Atuona.  In such scenes one perceives that immodesty is in the false shame that makes one cling to clothes, rather than in the simple virtues that walk naked and unashamed.