In him the European blood, of the best in the British Isles, arrested the abandon of the aborigine, and created a hesitant blend of dignity and awkwardness.  He was a striking-looking man, very tall, slender, about fifty years old, swarthy, with hair as black as night, and eyebrows like small mustaches, the eyes themselves in caverns, usually dull and dour, but when he talked, spots of light.  I thought of that Master of Ballantrae of Stevenson’s, though for all I remember he was blond.  Yet the characters of the two blended in my mind, and I tried to match them the more I saw of him.  He was born here, and after an education abroad and a sowing of wild oats over years of life in Europe, had lived here the last twenty-five years.  He was in trade, like almost every one here, but I saw no business instincts or habits about him.  One found him most of the time at the Cercle Bougainville, drinking sauterne and siphon water, shaking for the drinks, or playing ecarte for five francs a game.

Below the salt sat his son and his nephew, men of twenty-five years, but sons of Tahitian mothers, and without the culture or European education of their fathers.  With them two chauffeurs were seated.  One of these, an American, the driver for Polonsky, had tarried here on a trip about the world, and was persuaded to take employment with Polonsky.  The other was a half-caste, a handsome man of fifty, whose employer treated him like a friend.

Breakfast lasted two hours for us.  For the band it kept on until dinner, for they did not leave the table from noon, when we sat down, until dark.  When they did not eat, they drank.  Occasionally one of us slipped down and took his place with them.  I sat with them half an hour, while they honored me with “Johnny Burrown,” “The Good, Old Summertime,” and “Everybody Doin’ It.”

The heavy leads of the band were carried by an American with a two-horsepower accordion.  He told me his name was Kelly.  He was under thirty, a resolute, but gleesome chap, red-headed, freckled, and unrestrained by anybody or anything.  He had no respect for us, as had the others, and had come, he said, for practice on his instrument.  He had a song-book of the Industrial Workers of the World, a syndicalistic group of American laborers and intellectuals, and in it were scores of popular airs accompanied by words of dire import to capitalists and employers.  One, to the tune of “Marching through Georgia,” threatened destruction to civilization in the present concept.

“I’m an I. W. W.,” said Kelly to me, with a shell of rum in his hand.  “I came here because I got tired o’ bein’ pinched.  Every town I went to in the United States I denounced the police and the rotten government, and they throwed me in the calaboose.  I never could get even unlousy.  I came here six weeks ago.  It’s a little bit of all right.”