The government house was set half a mile farther on in the narrowing
ravine, and on the way we passed a desolate dwelling, squalid, set
in the marsh, its battered verandas and open doors disclosing a
wretched mingling of native bareness with poverty-stricken European
fittings. On the tottering veranda sat a ragged Frenchman, bearded
and shaggy-haired, and beside him three girls as blonde as German
_Mädchens_. Their white delicate faces and blue eyes, in such
surroundings, struck one like a blow. The eldest was a girl of
eighteen years, melancholy, though pretty, wearing like the others a
dirty gown and no shoes or stockings. The man was in soiled overalls,
and reeling drunk.

"That is Baufré," said Ducat. "He is always drunk. He married the
daughter of an Irish trader, a former officer in the British Indian
Light Cavalry. Baufré was a _sous-officier_ in the French forces here.
There is no native blood in those girls. What will become of them, I
wonder?"

A few hundred yards further on was the palace. It was a wooden house
of four or five rooms, with an ample veranda, surrounded by an acre
of ground fenced in. The sward was the brilliantly green, luxuriant
wild growth that in these islands covers every foot of earth surface.
Cocoanuts and mango-trees rose from this volunteer lawn, and under
them a dozen rosebushes, thick with excessively fragrant bloom.
Pineapples grew against the palings, and a bed of lettuce flourished
in the rear beside a tiny pharmacy, a kitchen, and a shelter for
servants.

On the spontaneous verdure before the veranda three score Marquesans
stood or squatted, the men in shirts and overalls and the women in