"We will rest here a few minutes, and you may bathe," said my lovely
guide. "I have not been to Fautaua vaimato for several years, but I
never forget the way. I will make a basket, and here we will gather
some fruit for our déjeuner for fear there might not be plenty at
the waterfalls."

I took off my tennis-shoes, hung my silk coat on a limb, and plunged
into the pool. Never but in the tropics does the human being fully
enjoy the dash into cool water. There it is a tingling pleasure. I
dived time and again, and then sat in the small glitter of sunlight
to dry and to watch Noanoa Tiare make the basket. She said she had
a wide choice there, as the leaves of the banana, cocoanut, bamboo,
pandanus, or aihere would serve. She had selected the aihere, the
common weed, and out of its leaves she deftly fashioned a basket a
foot long and wide and deep.

Although she had been in Paris and London and in New York, knew how
to play Beethoven and Grieg and Saint-Saëns, had had gowns made by
Paquin, and her portrait in the salon, she was at home in this glade
as a Tahitian girl a hundred years ago. The airs of the avenue de
l'Opéra in Paris, and, too, of the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, were
rarefied in this simple spot to the impulses and experiences of her
childhood in the groves and on the beaches of her beloved island.

When I had on my coat, we gathered limes, bananas, oranges, and a wild
pineapple that grew near by in a tangle of coffee and vanilla, and
the graceful acalypha. The yellow tecoma, a choice exotic in America,
shed its seeds upon the sow thistle, a salad, and the ape or wild
taro. The great leaves of the ape are like our elephant's ear plant,
and the roots, as big as war-clubs, are tubers that take the place