scores of years, and yet one hardly saw a Frenchman, and never a Frenchwoman, in the districts.  The French seldom ever ventured in the sea or the stream or to the reef.  Other Europeans and Americans found those interesting, at least, a little.  Brooke and I swam every day off the wharf of the chefferie.  The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant blond, gleamed in the violet radiancy like a dream figure of ivory.  We dived into schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the sun.  We laughed at his native name, Pupure, which means fair, and at the titles given Tahiti by visitors:  the New Cytherea by Bougainville, a russet Ireland by McBirney, my fellow voyager on the Noa-Noa and Aph-Rhodesia by a South-African who had fought the Boers and loved the Tahitian girls and who now idled with us.  Brooke, as we paddled over the dimpled lagoon, quoted the Greek for an apt description, the innumerable laughter of the waves.  Brooke had been in Samoa, and was about to leave for England after several months in Tahiti.  He wrote home that he had found the most ideal place in the world to work and live in.  On the wide veranda he composed three poems of merit, “The Great Lover,” “Tiare Tahiti,” and “Retrospect.”  He could understand the Polynesian, and he loved the race, and hated the necessity of a near departure.  Their communism in work he praised daily, their singing at their tasks, and their wearing of flowers.  We had in common admiration of those qualities and a fervor for the sun.  For his Greek I gave him St. Francis’s canticle, which begins: 

    Laudate sie, mi signore, cum tuote le tue creature,
    Spetialmente messer lo frate sole.

Praised be my Lord, with all his creatures, and especially our brother the Sun, our sister the Moon, our brother the Wind, our sister Water, who is very serviceable unto us and humble and chaste and clean; our brother Fire, our mother Earth, and last of all for our sister Death.

We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met.  They could not accede to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about without self-consciousness.  The chief had said that in former times men retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they wore a little red cap.  He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits in scales.  Man originated on the seashore, and many of the most primitive habits of humans, as well as their bodily differences from the apes, came from their early life there.  Man pushed back from the salt water slowly.