Annexe was bounded by the Broom Road and the rue de Bougainville,
and across that street was the restaurant of Mme. Fanny. It was built
over a tiny stream, which emptied fifty feet away into the lagoon. A
clump of banana-trees hid the patrons, but did not obscure their view
from Fanny's balcony.

In the lagoon, a thousand yards from me, was Motu Uta, a tiny island
ringed with golden sand, a mass of green trees half disclosing a
gray house. Motu Uta was a gem incomparable in its beauty and its
setting. It had been the place of revels of old kings and chiefs,
and Pomaré the Fourth had made it his residence. Cut off by half a
mile of water from Papeete, it had an isolation, yet propinquity,
which would have persuaded me to make it my home were I a governor;
but it was given over to quarantine purposes, with an old caretaker
who came and went in a commonplace rowboat.

The Annexe housed many rats. I brought to my rooms a basket of bananas,
and put it on a table by my bed, the canopied four-poster in which
the son of the baroness was born. In the night I was awakened by
a tremendous thump on the floor and a curious dragging noise. I
listened breathlessly. But the rat must have heard me, for he ceased
operations, only returning when he thought I was asleep. He leaped on
the table, scratched a banana from the basket, threw it to the floor,
and pulled it to his den near the wardrobe. The joists and floor
boards were eaten away by the ants, and in one hole six or seven
inches long this rat had entrance to his den between the floor and
the ceiling of the room below. He had trading proclivities, and in
exchange brought me old and valueless trifles. I once knew a miner
in Arizona who found a rich gold-vein through a rat bringing him a
piece of ore in exchange for a bit of bacon. He traced the rat to his