and the hills. Red and gray roofs appeared among the mass of growing
things at almost the same height, for the capital rested on only a
narrow shelf of rising land, and the mountains descended from the sky
to the very water's-edge. Greener than the Barbadoes, like malachite
upon the dazzling Spanish Main, Tahiti gleamed as a promise of Elysium.

A lighthouse, tall minister of warning, lifted upon a headland, and
suddenly there was disclosed intimately the brilliant, shimmering surf
breaking on the tortuous coral reef that banded the island a mile
away. It was like a circlet of quicksilver in the sun, a quivering,
shining, waving wreath. Soon we heard the eternal diapason of these
shores, the constant and immortal music of the breakers on the white
stone barrier, a low, deep, resonant note that lulls the soul to
sleep by day as it does the body by night.

Guardian sound of the South Seas it is, the hushed, echoic roar of a
Jovian organ that chants of the dangers of the sea without, and the
peace of the lagoon within, the reef.

A stretch of houses showed--the warehouses and shops of the merchants
along the beach, the spire of a church, a line of wharf, a hundred
tiny homes all but hidden in the foliage of the ferns. These gradually
came into view as the ship, after skirting along the reef, steered
through a break in the foam, a pass in the treacherous coral, and
glided through opalescent and glassy shallows to a quay where all
Papeete waited to greet us.

The quay was filled with women and men and children and dogs. Carriages
and automobiles by the score attended just outside. Conspicuous
above all were the Tahitian and part-Tahitian girls. In their long,