No longer I walked the streets as one smitten with the plague, or revolved in envious circles about the market-place, where I could have got my fill for a half-dollar, but had neither the one nor the other. No longer I went at daybreak to swell the procession at the water-spout, or sat on the shore the picture of despair, waiting sunrise, finding it my sole happiness to watch a canoe-load of children drifting out upon the bay, singing like a railful of larks; nor walked solitarily through the night up and down the narrow streets wherein the _gendarmes_ had learned to pass me unnoticed, with my hat under my arm and my heart in my throat. Those delicious moons always seduced me from my natural sleep, and I sauntered through the cocoa-groves whose boughs glistened like row after row of crystals, whose shadows were as mosaics wrought in blocks of silver.
I used to nod at the low, whitewashed "calabooses" fairly steaming in the sun, wherein Herman Melville got some chapters of "Omoo."
Over and over again I tracked the ground of that delicious story, saying to the bread-fruit trees that had sheltered him, "Shelter me also, and whoever shall follow after, so long as your branches quiver in the wind!"
O reader of "Omoo," think of "Motoo-Otoo," actually looking warlike in these sad days, with a row of new cannons around its edge, and pyramids of balls as big as cocoanuts covering its shady centre.
Walking alone in those splendid nights I used to hear a dry, ominous coughing in the huts of the natives. I felt as though I were treading upon the brinks of half-dug graves, and I longed to bring a respite to the doomed race.
One windy afternoon we cut our stern hawser in a fair wind and sailed out of the harbour; I felt a sense of relief, and moralized for five minutes without stopping. Then I turned away from all listeners, and saw those glorious green peaks growing dim in the distance; the clouds embraced them in their profound secrecy; like a lovely mirage Tahiti floated upon the bosom of the sea. Between sea and sky was swallowed up vale, garden, and waterfall; point after point crowded with palms; peak above peak in that eternal crown of beauty; and with them the nation of warriors and lovers falling like the leaf, but, unlike it, with no followers in the new season.