After the rite, all made a dash for their equipages, and raced for the bride’s home, where, as customary, the fete champetre was given.  Again on mama’s lap, and Brooke on papa’s, both ample, we hurried, the bon pere not averse to taking a wheel off the bridal party’s motor-car.  With cries of delight we drove into a great cocoanut-grove, and a thousand feet back from the Broom Road emerged into a sunlit, but shady, clearing.  Huro! the banquet was already being spread.  From different parts of the plantation men came bearing huge platters of roasted pig, chicken, taro, breadfruit, and feis, with bamboo tubes of the taiaro sauce like the reeds of a great pipe-organ.  Caldrons of shrimp, crabs, prawns, and lobsters bubbled, and monstrous heaps of tiny oysters were being opened.  Fresh fruit was in rich hoards:  bananas, oranges, custard-apples, papayas, pomegranates, mangoes, and guavas.

A magnificent bower a hundred feet long, broad and high, had been erected of bamboo and gigantic leaves.  It was similar to a temple builded by the ardent worshipers of Dionysus to celebrate the vine-god’s feast.  The roof of green thatch was supported on a score of the slender pillars of the ohe, the golden bamboo, and there were neither sides nor doors.  The pillars were wreathed with ferns and orchids from the forest near by, and on the sward between them were spread a series of yellow mats woven in the Paumotu atolls.  They carpeted the green floor of the temple, and upon them, in the center, the graceful leaves of the cocoanut stretched to mark the division of the vis-a-vis.

From these long leaves rose graduated alabaster columns, the inner stalks of the banana-plants, and on them were fastened flowers and ornaments, fanciful creations of the hands of Tahitian women, fashioned of brilliant leaves and of bamboo-fiber and the glossy white arrowroot-fiber.  From the top of each column floated the silken film of the snowy reva-reva, the exquisite component of the interior of young cocoa-palm-leaves, a gossamer substance the extraction of which is as difficult as the blowing of glass goblets.  Varos, marvelously spiced, prawns, and crayfish, garlanded the bases of these sylvan shafts, all highly decorative, and within reach of their admirers.

The stiff hand of the white which had garbed the wedding party in the ungraceful clothing of the European mode had failed to pose the natural attitude of the Tahitian toward good cheer.

A pile of breadfruit-leaves were laid before each feaster’s space in lieu of plates, and four half-cocoanut-shells, containing drinking water, cocoanut-milk, grated ripe cocoanut, and sea-water.  The last two were to be mixed to sauce the dishes, and the empty one filled with fresh water for a finger-bowl.

The bride and groom sat at the head of the leafy board, their intimates about them, and the pastor, who had joined them, stood a few moments with bowed head and closed eyes to invoke the blessing of God upon the revel, as did the orero, the pagan priest of Tahiti a few generations ago.  The pastor and I, with the owner of the Atimaona plantation and a Mr. Davey, had had an appetizer a moment before.