offenders against moral codes, and made Philistinism a creed. Gossip
was constant, and while sometimes caustic, more often it partook of
curiosity and mere trading of information or salacious prattle.

Tahitian women concealed nothing. If they won the favors of
a white man, they announced it proudly, and held nothing sacred
of the details. One's peculiarities, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies,
physical or spiritual blemishes, all became delectable morsels in the
mouths of one's intimates and their acquaintances. One's passions,
actions, and whisperings were as naked to the world as the horns on a
cow. Every one knew the import of Polonsky's dorsal tattooings, that
Pastor ---- had a case of gin in his house, and that the governor,
after a bottle or two of champagne, had squeezed so tightly the waist
of an English lady with whom he waltzed that she had cried out in
pain. Though bavardage accounted for much of the general knowledge
of every one's affairs, there was an uncanny mystery in the speed at
which a particular secret spread. One spoke of the bamboo telegraph.

It was proposed at the Cercle Bougainville that we have a series
of jaunts to points some distance away. I was promised that I
would see fully the way my acquaintances enjoyed themselves in the
open. Llewellyn was given charge of the first excursion. It was to
Moorea, an island a dozen miles or so to the northwest from Papeete,
and which, with Tetiaria and Mehetia and Tahiti, constitute les îles
de Vent, or Windward Islands of the Society archipelago.

In clear weather one cannot look out to sea from Papeete, to the north
or west, without Moorea's weird grandeur confronting one. The island
of fairy-folk with golden hair, it was called in ancient days by the
people of other islands. A third of the size of Tahiti, it was, until