'Treasure Island.' Comes into my pub in Taiohae in the Marquesas
Islands did Stevenson off'n his little Casco, and says he, ''Ave
ye any whisky,' 'e says, ''at 'asn't been watered? These South Seas
appear to 'ave flooded every bloomin' gallon,' 'e says. This painter
Gauguin wasn't such good company as Stevenson, because 'e parleyvoud,
but 'e was a bloody worker with 'is brushes at Atuona. 'E was cuttin'
wood or paintin' all the time."

"He was a damn' fool," said Hallman, who had come in to the Cercle
to take away Captain Pincher. "I lived close to him at Atuona all
the time he was there till he died. He was bughouse. I don't know
much about painting, but if you call that crazy stuff of Gauguin's
proper painting, then I'm a furbelowed clam."

"Eh bien," Count Polonsky said, with a smile of the man of superior
knowledge, "he is the greatest painter of this period, and his
pictures are bringing high prices now, and will bring the highest
pretty soon. I have bought every one I could to hold for a raise."

Polonsky was a study in sheeny hues. He was twenty-seven, his black
and naturally curled hair was very thin, there were eight or nine
teeth that answered no call from his meat, and he wore in his right
eyesocket a round glass, with no rim or string, held by a puckering
of cheek and brow, giving him a quizzical, stage-like stare, and
twisting his nose into a ripple of tiny wrinkles. He weighed, say,
one hundred pounds or less, was bent, but with a fresh complexion
and active step. I saw him rise naked from his cot one morning, and
the first thing he put on was the rimless monocle. The natives, who
name every one, called him "Matatitiahoe," "the one-windowed man." He
had journeyed about the world, poked into some queer places, and in