Breakfast with elders—The great Mapuhi enters—He tells of San Francisco—Of prizefighters and Police gazettes—I reside with Nohea—Robber crabs—The cats that warred and caught fish.

TIMES in my life a bath had been a guerdon after days of denial in desert and at sea, but seldom so grateful as that in the stony garden of Mapuhi under the tropical sun. My wounds were healing, but the new skin forming in a score of places bound me like patches of plaster. Not many houses in the Paumotus were constructed to impound rain, even for drinking purposes. The cocoanut furnished the liquid for quenching thirst, or the brackish rain-water retained in holes dug five or six feet in the coral was drunk by the natives. The Europeans of any permanent residence gathered the rain in barrels or cisterns, and sometimes made ample reservoirs, while in a few atolls were little fresh lakes fed by rains, the bottoms of which were formed by a coral limestone impervious to water. Such lakes were very precious.

When I went up the steps to the house, I found the Mormon elders fully dressed and preparing breakfast for three. A can of California peaches, a small broiled fish, and pilot biscuits were all the meal, but the grace was worthy of a feast. They bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and implored God to bless their fare, to make it strengthen them for the affairs of this world only as they conduced to His greater honor and glory. And they put in a word for me, “Our brother who has come among us all unannounced, but doubtless for some good purpose known to Him who directs the sparrow’s fall, and the sphere’s movements.”

“We have to economize dreadfully,” said De Kalb, apologetically. “We are spending our savings. Canned goods are dear. But we are saving souls right along. There is to be a service in the temple in half an hour, and we would like you to attend. We are going to pray for a successful rahui, the diving season, and for the safety of the divers. You know they never know when they’re going to come up dying or dead from the bottom of the lagoon.”

As he spoke there was framed in the doorway a native whom I knew instinctively to be the monarch of this cluster of atolls. He wore only a dark-blue pareu stamped with white flowers, but some men have an air which makes you know at first sight that they are masters of those about them. So was this Mapuhi, who, of all Paumotuans in a hundred years, had become distinguished among whites. Mapuhi was a giant in stature, a man solidly planted on spreading bare feet of which each toe was articulated as the fingers of a master pianist’s hand. His legs were rounded columns, the muscles hidden under the pad of flesh, his chest a great barrel, and below it a mighty belly, the abdomen of a Japanese or Chinese god of plenty. He was almost black from a life upon and in the salt water.

His head was huge, a mass of grizzled hair low upon his forehead. His eyes, very large and luminous, gentle but piercing, gave an impression of absolute fearlessness, of breadth of mind, and of devotion to his idea, be it ideal or indulgence. His chin was round and powerful, but not prognathous. His mouth was well-formed, big and sensual under the short gray mustache, and not lacking in humor or a trace of irony. His nose was all but missing, for once when building a schooner an adz had slipped and cut it off. His face was thus flattened, with a slight suggestion of a fragment of a Greek gladiator’s head; but it was not so disfigured as one might think, and preserved a mien of dignity and reserve force, of moral grandeur and superiority which one might call kingly were kings as of old. But it was in his eyes I read the reasons for his rise from the ruck of his race to lordship over it, and to the admiration of the white traders and mariners whom he bested in all their own ways—navigation, ship-building, and even trade.

When Mapuhi saw me, he looked inquiringly at the elders, and then smiled. I saw two rows of teeth, large as my thumb nail, and as brilliant as the pearl-shell from which he had wrung his vast fortune. He stood upright, straight as a mast, solid as a tree, and commanding in every sense. More than seventy years of wrestling with the devils of the sea and lagoon, and the outcasts of Europe and America, had failed to bow him an inch or to take from him apparently a single attribute of his vigorous manhood except that across his broad face ran a score of wrinkles, which criss-crossed his forehead into diamond panes, and made one know he had learned the secrets of man and wind and water by fearful experience.

Thus was Mapuhi who had made the winds and currents his sport, who in the dark of night ran the foaming passes that the white mariner shunned even in daylight, and who had made the trees and lagoons of his isles pay him princely toll. This was the man who alone had outwitted the white trader who came to take much and give little.

“Good morning,” said Mapuhi, in English, of which he knew only a few words. He gave me a probing glance, and retired, to appear in a few minutes in black calico trousers, a pink undershirt, and a belt of red silk. His eyes asked me if I was a trader come to compete with him. He sat down in a great chair that vaguely resembled a throne, wrought of bamboo, and carved, and trussed to bear the exceeding weight of the man, for Mapuhi was over three hundred pounds. As he sat he inquired of the elders the reason for my being there. He did it with his foot. He twisted his toes into the most expressive interrogation, which was a plain question to the elders. They said in Paumotuan that I was an American, an important man, but precisely what were my affairs they did not know. I was interested in Mormonism, in Takaroa, and in the career of Mapuhi. Assured that I was not another Tahiti trader, Mapuhi put out his great hands and took into them one of mine, and pressed it, as he said in Paumotuan, “My island is yours.”

I was loath to talk my poor Paumotuan, because I wanted to get as closely as possible to the mind of this noblest of his tribe; and so I conversed in French, except when I appealed to the elders for more exact meanings in Paumotuan.

“Mapuhi,” I began, “even in San Francisco sailors know your skill in these dangerous waters.”

“Ah, San Francisco!” said Mapuhi, regretfully. “I was there. I had a ship built there, and I sailed it to Takaroa. I lived there a week in your great house into which one drives with horses.”

I conjured a picture of Mapuhi coming in a hack from the dock in San Francisco to the Palace Hotel, and of the striking contrast between this mighty man of these isles and the little men of finance and of commerce who must have dined about him. Kalakaua, king of the Hawaiian Islands, had lived there, and had died there. But charming as was that prince of bons vivants, he was nevertheless the victim of the white man’s vices, and as years passed, his appearance became that of an overfed, over-ginned head porter. Even the patrons of the Palace must have had some vision of this man Mapuhi on the deck of his schooner, his vast chest and arms bare, his hair blown by the wind. Or, emerging from the waters of the lagoon, arising from the plunge to the coral cave where the lethal shark looks for prey. This was what he spoke in face and form to me.

“I had seven nights,” said Mapuhi, “in your great house, and seven days in your streets. The people were like the fish in the lagoon of Pukapuka, where no man seeks them, and where they crowd each other until they kill. I went in a room from the ground to where I slept, a room that moved on a cord; and I rode in other rooms that moved about the roads on iron bands in which people sat who never said a word to one another, and who never spoke to me. As I walked in the roads they were dark as in the cocoanut-groves, for your houses make caves of the roads, as under the barrier-reef.”

“But, Mapuhi,” I said, “we are happy in our way.”

“You do not laugh much,” returned the chief. “Only I heard the laughter from the houses in which you sold rum. I am a good Mormon. I do not now drink your mad waters, but in your city only the mad waters made men happy. I was a gentile myself many years and did not know the truth. I, too, drank the mad waters.”

Mapuhi’s eyes sought the picture of Brigham Young which was on the wall, but mine went to the figures of the prize-fighters, Jeffries and Johnson. Mapuhi intercepted my glance and immediately became alert.

“Was it possible that I had ever seen Teferite or Tihonitone?”

This question was put to Elder Overton, who hesitated to interpret. The subject was a scandal throughout the Paumotus. I read that in the preacher’s face, but, comprehending the import of the words, I said that I knew Teferite; that he lived very near me, and that I saw him often in his store. Once or twice I had bought goods of him. He was getting very fat since Tihonitone had whipped him, and most of his time he hunted fish and wild animals. Tihonitone, the neega, as the Paumotuans call Afro-Americans, I had seen more than once, I said.

“That neega knocked down the white Teferite and took the hundreds of thousands of francs given the winner,” said Mapuhi, with spirit. “They are both great men, but the neega is the greatest. Next to the chiefs of the Mormon church, they are the greatest Americans.”

“Have you never heard of Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt?” I demanded.

He did not know the man. An acquaintance in Tahiti sent him now and then the pink paper which contained the pictures of fighting men, of fighting dogs, and of women whose bosoms and legs were bare. America must now be full of these fights, and of beautiful women almost naked, he said.

“Your two most famous men, Teferite and Tihonitone, sell rum. The goods you bought of Teferite was rum, for he keeps a rum store in Los Angelese, and the neega, in Keekago.”

Each sentence tore the elders’ hearts, but Mapuhi salved their wounds.

“These men are gentiles, I know,” he concluded. “The elders have informed me. Mormons sell no rum. But tell me, is Tihonitone master of his white wife? I have her picture. She is beautiful.”

Overton frowned.

“Mapuhi,” he said, gently, “you make too much of those ‘Police Gazette’ pictures. The godly in America never see them. They are for the rum-drinkers, and are found only in the resorts of the wicked. Strength is admirable, but the fighting men of our country are the Philistines whom Jehovah chastised.”

To me, in English, the Utahan said: “That coon’s licking the white man has cost the whole white race dear. A preacher in India told me England could better have afforded to give Johnson five million dollars, for what it has cost in troops. The same in Africa. The evil of prize-fighting, was never better exemplified. Jeffries’ beating has hurt religion seriously.”

Mapuhi and the elders left the room, and returned in a few minutes in black broadcloth coats and high white collars, in which they sweated woefully. We all walked to the temple. It was close beside the beach, built of coral blocks, smeared with cement, white as the ocean foam. Its iron roof, painted crimson, was the only spot of color on the motu, except the nodding palms.

“It is like the blood of the martyrs,” exclaimed Overton, piously. “The temple was begun over twenty years ago. Nine years it took to build it, because the converts were few and poor, and labor scarce. Twice cyclones leveled it. Ten years ago the Takaroans began it again, and for two years it has been completed. I know of no more sublime monument to the true religion than this little temple. Every block of coral is a redeemed soul. If only the gentiles in America knew the work we were doing!”

We entered the temple reverently, the congregation, already seated, nearly filling it. On its rude coral floor were rough benches accommodating five or six persons each. A pulpit of gingerbread scrollwork, the only other furniture, was apologized for by De Kalb.

“It was the plainest we could get. It was made for the Catholics. They like ’em fancy, like their religion.”

Elder Overton preached the sermon. De Kalb read from the Bible and the “Book of Mormon.” The people who filled the edifice paid all attention. Serious always in their demeanor, except when affected by alcohol, they were positively melancholy in religion. All who could afford it wore black, and the oldsters had long frock coats of funereal hue, and collars like the Americans.

After the services, I broached to the elders my necessity of a habitation. With the diving season opening in a few weeks, divers and traders would be at Takaroa from all about, and the 140 people of the atoll would be multiplied three or four times. Most of these divers would crowd in the houses of the natives, and the majority of the traders would live on their schooners. Mapuhi regretted that all his accommodations were bespoken.

The elders took me to the house of Nohea, a small, neat cottage, at the end of the avenue leading from the mole, an avenue all shining white with coral sand. It reminded me of the shell roads of my native State, Maryland, in my childhood. It was lined with the shanties and huts of the inhabitants.

Nohea greeted me quietly. He was a dark man, six feet four inches in height, big all over, his muscles well insulated by deep fat, and with the placid giantism of a Yeddo wrestler. He was taciturn, reserved, and melancholy. Most of these natives became spiritually strained when, as commonly, late in life, they gave up the wicked pleasures of the flesh—alcohol, tobacco, and philandering. They lost toleration for unrighteousness, and the joy that in their unregenerate state had oozed from their wicked pores turned to acid.

A friend and sometime partner of Mapuhi, and as devout a Mormon, Nohea was, next to Mapuhi, the foremost figure in the archipelago. He was not a trader, except that he sold his pearls, shell, and copra for money and merchandise; but he had dignity, strength, and personality—not quite as had Mapuhi, but more than any other Takaroan. Among Paumotuans few men showed distinctive character. Nohea possessed that, and also physical strength and skill for the diving, for the handling of boats, and for the making of copra. When there was no white missionary at Takaroa, he was the hierophant of the Mormon church. He conducted the services and advised the faithful, collected the tithes, and admonished the sinners. He did not fail in zeal for that task. Nohea painted a hell darker than a shark’s jaws, a pit of horror, lit by black flames which burned the non-Mormons, and a heaven on earth where baked pig was a free dish at all hours. The Mormon heaven is nearer the Mussulman’s than the Christian’s. Food and rills of fresh water, many beautiful and passionate wives, song and feasting, were promised the Paumotuan. Golden harps and streets of pearl would hardly have brought their tithes to the church treasury.

The very day I joined him I began to see things through his eyes. I was bathing at dusk in the clear waters of the lagoon near our home. The severe heat of the equatorial day had passed, and the still salt lake was as refreshing to my sun-stricken and coral-scratched body as the spring of the oasis to the parched traveler. The night was riding fast after the sunken sun, and driving the last gleam of color from the sky.

As I floated at ease upon the quiet surface of the pale-green lagoon, the sounds of the murmurous twilight—the rustling of the trees and the splash of the surf on the outer shore—were made discordant by a peculiar scraping noise near-by. I turned lazily over on my face and raised my head from the water.

On the coral in the deceptive half-light of the crepuscule was a hideous, shell-backed monster, which had emerged from an unseen lair, and moved slowly and lumberingly toward the cocoanut-trees. Its motions and appearance, in the semi-obscurity, took on the quality of a dream-beast, affrighting in its amazing novelty. It was like a great paper-mÂchÉ animal in a pantomine.

I was beset by apprehension that it might advance to the lagoon and approach me in an element in which it would be my master. I swam swiftly to shore and called, “Nohea!”

My companion came from near our hut, where on the red-hot coral stones, which had been made to glow by a fire of cocoanut-husks, he cooked the fish he had caught that afternoon.

He looked at me inquiringly, and I pointed to the alarming creature now disappearing in the palm-grove.

“Aue!” he cried irascibly, and sprang after the nightmare. When I overtook him, he was standing at the foot of a lofty cocoanut-tree and shaking his fist at the object of his pursuit, which was climbing with unbelievable speed up the slippery gray trunk.

“I teienei! It is the kaveu, that devil of the night who robs us of our cocoanuts while we sleep. But wait! I made a vow to destroy the next one I found thieving!”

Nohea went a hundred yards to where a banana plant was growing in earth brought from Tahiti. He gathered clay and leaves, and with painstaking effort fashioned a wreath of the mixture six inches wide and several feet in length. I stood in wonderment, guessing that he was making a charm to bring about the death of the despoiler of the groves.

Nohea took a length of coir, the rope the Paumotuans make of cocoanut-fiber,—from the tree which feeds them, clothes them, and houses them,—and, tying it into a girdle but little larger than the girth of the palm, put it about his wrists. The cocoanut-tree had, at regular intervals upon its trunk, projecting bands of its tough bark, and about the first of these above his head Nohea slipped the rope. He pulled himself up by it, and, clasping the tree with his legs, seized a higher holding-place. Thus he proceeded with ease until he had reached a point half-way of the lofty column. There he halted, and, taking from his shoulders his matted band, he plastered it firmly around the trunk.

He then slipped to the ground. I was as puzzled as a boy who was told at sailing that the ship was weighing its anchor, and saw no scale.

“That will do for him,” said Nohea, “as the reef shatters the canoe when the steersman fails to find the pass.”

He returned to the fire, and soon we were absorbed in the pleasant processes of supper. We lived simply, becoming near-to-nature folk, but we had plenty. First, we ate popo, tiny fish we had snared in our traps, and which we swallowed raw, after a soaking in the juice of limes. With our bonito steak we had broiled cocoanut-meat, and for drink we opened the wondrous chalices of the green nuts and enjoyed the cool wine. There was no breadfruit, for these islands of stone afforded no nourishment to such delicate and rich plants. But we had ship’s biscuit from the schooner, and for desert a pot of loganberry jam. Nohea, his stomach full, sat contemplatively on his haunches. Now and then he cocked his ear toward the cocoanut-grove, but he said nothing. The crown of the tree in which the giant crustacean had vanished was lost in the gloom of night. A slight breeze sprang up from the distance toward the Land of the War Fleet, and pandanus and mikimiki bushes nodded and gave forth little noises as their leaves and branches rubbed together.

Over all was the atmosphere of mystic aloofness which the white feels so keenly in these far-away dots—the utter difference of scene and incident from the accustomed one of the home land. I mused about my own future in these little known tropics—

Nohea cautiously raised himself to his feet, and, motioning me to be silent, directed my attention to the tree up which had gone the ugly marauder an hour before. We heard plainly a grating, incisive noise, and in a moment a huge cocoanut fell from among the swaying leaves to the earth.

A smothered exclamation of fury broke from the Paumotuan, but he made no step and continued pointing at the palm. Then I heard a scratching, and peering through the darkness with the aid of my electric torch, I saw the colossal crab coming down the trunk. He held on to the slippery bark by the sharp points of his walking legs, and backwardly descended with extreme care.

Nohea watched intently as the animal neared the girdle of clay and leaves. I noted his excitement, but still could not resolve his plan. It flashed upon me as its success was established in an instant of action.

The robber-crab, touching the clay, moved less carefully, and suddenly, to my astonishment, let go his hold, and with claws wildly beating the air, whirled downward from the height of forty feet, crashing on the rocks at the foot of the tree. In a second Nohea was upon him with a club of purau wood. But there was no need for further punishment. The drop had caused instant death. The immense shell was smashed and the monster lay inert upon the coral stones.

The diver sprang in the air and clapped his hands rapidly, as might a winning better at a prize-fight.

“The fool!” he said. “He has no koekoe—no bowels of wisdom. He thought the clay was the bottom, and that he was already with the nut he had robbed me of, and which he could open and eat. Many I have killed like that one, but it takes time. I have had such a thief steal my pareu for his house, and a bottle of kerosene for mere mischief. We will eat the flesh of this one’s legs, and I will melt his fat against the rahui when I might have rheumatism.”

Nohea showed me a great mass of blue fat under the kaveu’s tail, and from this he boiled down a quart of the finest oil. It was not only a specific for rheumatism but the best possible lubricant for sewing-machines and clocks, he said. He put some of the oil in the sun, and when thickened it made butter, though not with a milky taste.

This thievish crab seemed marked by his star—doubtless of the Cancer constellation—to play a deceptive part in the crustacean world, for not only had he practically abandoned the water as his element, learned to climb trees, and to eat food utterly foreign to his natural appetite, but he had a habit of hiding his tail when the rest of his body was in full view. He would stick it in any convenient hole, under a log, or even in the cocoanut-shell he had emptied. He was over-conscious and seemingly ashamed of it, like an awkward man of his hands at a wedding.

The kaveu’s descent from the hermit-crab family might explain his tail-concealment custom, for the hermit concealed his entire body in a borrowed shell, and so, perhaps, the robber-baron was but showing an atavistic remnant of the disguise instinct. The whole crab tribe seemed tainted with this fear of being merely themselves. Many of them picked up a piece of seaweed and stuck in on their projecting curved bristles, and let it grow as a kind of permanent bonnet. Others took pieces of live sponge, and fastened them to hooks on their backs. One clever chap stitched seaweed threads together to form a tube, and then crawled into it. And one masonic crab mixed a sandy cement and plastered its back with it until it looked like the floor of its pond.

These specious masqueraders selected colors, too, to suit their background, and the seaweed or sponge must match the environment or be rejected. Older and hardened backsliders invited oysters and other mollusks and worms that live in limestone pipes to dwell on their shells, and move about with them. I was convinced that these low-down-in-the-scale beings knew more about their environment, and practised “safety first” more assiduously, than did man himself. The biggest robber-crab in the Takaroa groves could not have got a humble hermit brother to volunteer to go to war against a crab colony, or risk his life to glorify the crab state.

In carrying a cocoanut, the robber crab held it under some of its walking legs, and retired, raised high on the tips of its other members a foot from the ground. Its body measured two feet long by eighteen inches wide. It did not use its claws in ascending the tree, but clung with the sharp points of its legs; and I saw it go up steep rocks upon these. The remarkable strength of this mollusk was proved when one was placed in an ordinary tin cracker-box, which it could not take hold of, and a few hours later had twisted off the lid. Nohea said that they were not easy to trap, and that more than once a Paumotuan, who had climbed a tree in the night to procure nuts, to his great horror had had his hair seized by a crab. He said that usually they bit off from six to ten nuts upon each ascent of a palm.

“The kaveu likes to eat the young turtles when they are hatched and making their first journey to the water,” Nohea informed me. “The crab, knowing where the eggs are buried, watches them as they mature in the sand.”

I told Nohea of the crabs I had seen in Japanese waters, some stretching seven or eight feet, and another which bore a human face upon its back. To see one of the latter crawling upon the sand was to see what apparently was a human mask moving across the beach. The Japanese said that these crabs were never known until after a fleet of pirates had been destroyed, and the leading villains beheaded upon the sea-shore.

Against the rat, which was perhaps a worse enemy of the beneficent cocoanut than the crab, my friend Nohea had no safeguard. He could not afford to encircle his trees with bands of tin, as did corporate owners of plantations in Tahiti, but he told me, with great appreciation, the story of Willi, the clever American dentist, and his atoll of Tetiaroa, near Tahiti. Once it was the resort of the kings and aristocracy of Tahiti, the sanatorium to which they went when jaded, or wounded in war or sport, and to which the belles retired to whiten their complexion by wearing off the sunburn in the shade of the banyans and cocoanuts. It was famed in the annals of the Arioi, the ancient minstrels of Tahiti, as a scene of orgiastic dances.

“The atoll of Tetiaroa,” said Nohea, “had always many cocoanut-trees. The lagoon is as rich in fish as is Takaroa. Never had many people lived there, for it was tabu, and only for the Arii, the nobles, and the Arioi. But now it belongs to the man who takes away teeth from the head, and who hammers gold upon those that remain.”

The master diver spun his tale vividly but slowly. Often he repeated the same statement, for the Paumotuan speech, like that of all Polynesia, is a picture language, and iteration and harping is the soul of it, as of the ancient Hebrew chronicles.

Upon my mat and gazing into the expressive eyes of the diver, I recalled what I myself had been told by the owner of Tetiaroa, and, with Nohea’s story, pieced together the facts.

Dr. Walter Johnstone Williams, the dentist of Tahiti for twenty years, had, as related Nohea, taken away the teeth of the South Sea Islanders or gilded those which remained. They love those shiny, precious-metal teeth, these children of the tropics, and would give almost anything to gain the golden smile they admired. So when the royal family of Tahiti fell in debt to Dr. Williams, they bartered, in exchange for fillings and pullings, facings and bridges, and for other good and sufficient consideration, the wondrous atoll of Tetiaroa. Upon it the shrewd and skillful dentist found tens of thousands of cocoanut-palms which had grown as volunteers in the generous way of tropic verdure, and he himself planted tens of thousands more in order to increase the copra crop. He found a plague of rats, and, being unwilling to expend the large sum that would be needed for the metal bands which would frustrate the rats, he longed for a Pied Piper to lead the pests into the sea. But he bethought himself of the proverbial appetite of the domestic cat for the rat, and, lacking a magic whistler, he advertised for cats, offering to pay a franc for each one brought to his house by the Papeete quay. He had copies of his advertisement struck off on the press and posted upon the trees in and about Papeete, as was the custom.

The result was a flood, a deluge, a typhoon of cats. The Tahitian boy was as eager as his American brother to earn a few coins to spend on luxuries; and so the cats, much like our own in appearance except for their tails, which were curved like a question-mark, came in bags, in boxes, and in nets, while others were personally conducted, yowling, in the arms of the Tahitian youth.

Dentist Williams had not expected so many, and had much trouble in finding places for them to reside until he could remove them to Tetiaroa.

There were cats in his office, cats on the landings, cats in every room, and his garden was a boarding-place of felines. When more than a thousand had been collected, he posted a notice to ward off any further sellers, and, chartering a schooner, hastened with his live cargo to the atoll. There was no necessity of putting down a gangway from the vessel to the little wharf at Tetiaroa, for once she was made fast it needed but the loosening of their bonds to cause the thousand cats to reach the shore in one bound from the deck.

Of course, the cats set immediately about their pleasant business of catching and eating the rodents. There were tens of thousands of them, perhaps hundreds of thousands, because the island had been little inhabited for many years and the rats had been multiplying unmolested. But with a thousand South Sea Island cats to prey upon them, the easy supply of rats was soon exhausted. Then the cats chased them up and down the trees, in and out of caves and from every refuge, so that there came a day when the last rat was in the maw of a cat.

Meanwhile, with such rich meat diet the cats increased mightily. When the rats were all gone, they were confronted with the problem of existence for uncounted thousands of cats. They might have learned to eat cocoanuts, but they had become such confirmed meat-eaters that they would not abandon their carnal appetites. They did what greed does the world over—what the Russians did recently—they began to eat one another. And they followed the example of industrialism which takes the young in factories.

First toms and tabbies lay in wait for the children of other cats, and soon there was not a kitten left alive, nor could the parents prevent the devouring of their children because of the avid hunger of the adults.

With the kittens gone, began a struggle, with the death of all as the apparent end in view. Swifter and stronger cats slew weaker cats, and the cats which allied themselves in bands, attacked distant strongholds of cats. Slowly and surely went on this internecine warfare, with the seeming certainty that, if not halted, one day the last two cats on Tetiaroa would face each other in the final contest of prowess. Then one lone cat might remain doomed to certain death from starvation, because there would be no meat left.

Once on a leviathan Atlantic liner, when the usual exterminating process of hydrocyanic gas could not be used, all food was removed, and the rats were left to starve, with a dozen cats to hasten the end. But the rats ate the cats, and then the leather cushions, and finally their weaker brethren, until the last rat died of starvation.

But on Tetiaroa when there were but a few dozen of the quickest, cleverest, and strongest cats remaining, the process suddenly stopped. Atavism, heredity, or the stern battle for life, developed in the survivors unusual intelligence, or they had a return of plain cat-sense. Perhaps they held a powwow, or meowmeow, or whatever a council of cats should be called, and decided upon the one course that would preserve their species. In any event, they saved themselves by ending the warfare. They reverted to the habits of their forefathers, and went fishing. It is as natural for a cat to fish as for a dog to hunt a rabbit. Falconer marked the ferocious jaguars of South America lying in wait upon the shores of the river Plata to seize the fish that passed by the roots of the trees. My goldfish ponds in California were raided by cats many times.

“I myself,” said Nohea, “have seen the fisher-cats of Tetiaroa stretched at length on the shores of the lagoon, awaiting their prey. I have seen a mother cat, with her kittens stringing in a cue behind her, snaring in silence, and with paws fierce to strike, the small fish which come in the eddies of the shallow pools. I have seen the good parent pass a small fish back to her child and smile under her bristling whiskers at her cleverness in providing such fare for her little ones.”

The diver ceased speaking, and unrolled his mat. He knelt a moment and prayed, and then he laid him down, and in a moment his deep breathing was informing of his serene slumber.

I lay there a few minutes thinking of his story, of the robber-crabs and the fisher-cats, and above me the vast fronds of the cocoas inclined to and fro, while, doubtless, other industrious crabs, unwarned by their kindred’s fate, were climbing for nuts.