rain. I walked the length of the built-up waterfront. The little
boats were being pulled out from the shore by the several launches,
and were making fast to buoys or putting down two and three anchors
a hundred fathoms away from the quays.

The storm increased all the morning, and at noon, when I looked at
the barometer in the Cercle Bougainville it was 29.51, the lowest,
the skippers said, in seven years. The William Olsen, a San Francisco
barkentine, kedged out into the lagoon as fast as possible, and
through the tearing sheets of rain I glimpsed other vessels reaching
for a holding-ground. The Fetia Taiao had made an anchorage a thousand
feet toward the reef. The waves were hammering against the quays,
and the lagoon was white with fury.

In the club, after all had been made secure, the skippers and managers
of trading houses gathered to discuss the weather. Tahiti is not so
subject to disastrous storms as are the Paumotu Islands and the waters
toward China and Japan, yet every decade or two a tidal-wave sweeps
the lowlands and does great injury. Though this occurs but seldom,
when the barometer falls low, the hearts of the owners of property and
of the people who have experienced a disaster of this kind sink. The
tides in this group of islands are different from anywhere else in the
world I know of in that they ebb and flow with unchanging regularity,
never varying in time from one year's end to another.

Full tide comes at noon and midnight, and ebb at six in the morning
and six in the evening, and the sun rises and sets between half
past five and half past six o'clock. There is hardly any twilight,
because of the earth's fast rotation in the tropics. This is a fixity,
observed by whites for more than a century, and told the first seamen