The governor and the commissionaire, Ah Yu and Apporo, Monsieur Bapp with Song of the Nightingale and Flag, made the palace tremble while the thrum of the great drums maddened their blood.

Exhausted at last, they lay panting on the boards.  Song was telling me that the liquor of the governor’s giving surpassed all his illicit make, and that when his sentence expired he would remain at the palace as cook.  Ah Yu, in broken English, sang a ditty he had heard forty years earlier in California, “Shoo-fle-fly-doan-bodder-me.”  Apporo, overcome by the rum and the dance, was lying among the rose-bushes.  Many others were flung on the sward, and more rose again to the dance, singing and shouting and demanding more rum.  The girls came forward to be kissed, as was the custom, and Madame Bapp drove them away with sharp words.

Soon the hullabaloo became too great for the dignity of the governor.  He gave orders to clear the grounds, and Bauda issued commands from the veranda while Song and Flag lugged away the drums and drove the excited mob out of the garden and across the bridge.  All in all, this Sunday was typical of Atuona under the new regime.

After a quiet bath in the pool below my cabin I got my own dinner, unassisted by Exploding Eggs, and went early to bed to forestall visitors.  The crash of a falling cocoanut awakened me at midnight, and I saw on my paepae Apporo, Flower, Water, and Chief Kekela Avaua, asleep.  The chief had hung his trousers over the railing, and was in his pareu, his pictured legs showing, while the others lay naked on my mats.  There was no need to disturb them, for it is the good and honored custom of these hospitable islands to sleep wherever slumber overtakes one.

The night was fine, the stars looked down through the breadfruit-trees, and Temetiu, the giant mountain, was dark and handsome in the blue and gold sky.  Two sheep were huddled together by my trail window, the horses were lying down in the brush, and a nightingale lilted a gay love song in the cocoanut-palms above the House of the Golden Bed.

Next morning all Atuona had a tight handkerchief bound over its forehead.  I met twenty men and women with this sign of repentance upon their brows.  Watercress, the chief of Atuona, who guards the governor’s house, was by the roadside.

“You have drunk too much,” I remarked, as I spied the rag about his head.

“Not too much, but a great deal,” he rejoined.

“Faufau,” I said further, which means that it is a bad thing.

“Hana paopao” he said sadly.  “It is disagreeable to work.  One likes to forget many things.”

There was bitterness and sorrow in his tone.  His father was a warrior, under the protection of Toatahu, the god of the chiefs, and led many a victorious foray when Watercress was a child.  The son remembers the old days and feels deeply the degradation and ruin brought by the whites upon his people.  A distinguished-looking man, dignified and haughty, he was one of half a dozen who were working out taxes by repairing the roads, and he was one of the few who worked steadily, saying little and seldom smiling.