The practical British would that. They have done so in a dozen of
their far-flung colonies I hare been in, from Singapore to Barbadoes,
though they have failed utterly in Jamaica. Yet, I am at first sight,
of the mind that only the Spanish would have kept, after decades of
administration, as much of the simple beauty of Papeete as have the
Gauls. True, the streets are a litter, the Government almost unseen
as to modern uplift, the natives are indolent and life moves without
bustle or goal. The republic is content to keep the peace, to sell
its wares, to teach its tongue, and to let the gentle Tahitian hold
to his island ways, now that his race dies rapidly in the spiritual
atmosphere so murderous to natural, non-immunized souls and bodies.

Many streets and roads are shaded by spreading mango-trees, a fruit
brought in the sixties from Brazil, and perfected in size and flavor
here by the patient efforts of French gardeners and priests. The trees
along the town ways are splendid, umbrageous masses of dark foliage
whose golden crops fall upon the roadways, and which have been so
chosen that though they are seasonal, the round mango is succeeded
by the golden egg, and that by a small purple sort, while the large,
long variety continues most of the year. Monseigneur Jaussen, the
Catholic bishop who wrote the accepted grammar and dictionary of the
Tahitian language, evolved a delicious, large mango, with a long,
thin stone very different from the usual seed, which occupies most
of the circumference of this slightly acidulous, most luscious of
tropical fruits. Often the pave is a spatter of the fallen mangos,
its slippery condition of no import to the barefooted Tahitian,
but to the shod a cause of sudden, strange gyrations and gestures,
and of irreverence toward the Deity.

Scores of varieties of fruits and flowers, shade-trees, and ornamental