and a string of gorgeous baroque pearls about her rounded neck.

My room at the Tiare was in the upper story of an old house that sat
alone in the back garden, among the domestics, automobiles, carriages,
horses, pigs, and fowls. The house had wide verandas all about it,
and the stairway outside. A few nights after I had arrived in Tahiti
I was writing letters on the piazza, the length of the room away from
the stairs. I had a lamp on my table, and the noise of my type-writer
hushed the sounds of any one entering the apartment. It was about ten
o'clock, and between sentences I looked at the night. The stars were
in coruscating masses, the riches of the heavens disclosed as only
at such a cloudless hour in this southern hemisphere, the Milky Way
showing ten thousand gleaming members of the galaxy that are hidden
in our skies. I thought of those happy mariners who first sailed their
small, wooden ships into these mysterious seas, and first of our race,
saw this strangely brilliant macrocosm, and appreciated it for its
marvels and its differences from their own bleaker, Western vault.

There were no doors in the openings into my room from the verandas, but
hangings of gorgeous scarlet calico, pareus, kept out the blazing sun,
and lent a little privacy at night. All the furniture was a chair,
a dressing-table, and two large beds, canopied with mosquito-nets,
evidently provided for a double lodging if needed.

As I finished my letters twenty feet away, a Tahitian girl parted the
farther curtain nearest the stairway, and slipped into the room with
the silence of the accustomed barefooted. Imagine her in her gayest
gown of rose color, a garland of hinano-flowers on her glossy head,
her tawny hair in two plaits to her unconfined waist, and her eyes
shining with the spirit of her quest!