Please keep this: I have no perfect copy.
_Tautira, on the peninsula of Tahiti._
TAUTIRA, ISLAND OF TAHITI
[November, 1888].
DEAR TOMARCHER,—This is a pretty state of things! seven o'clock and
no word of breakfast! And I was awake a good deal last night, for it
was full moon, and they had made a great fire of cocoanut husks down
by the sea, and as we have no blinds or shutters, this kept my room
very bright. And then the rats had a wedding or a school-feast under
my bed. And then I woke early, and I have nothing to read except
Virgil's _Æneid_, which is not good fun on an empty stomach, and a Latin
dictionary, which is good for naught, and by some humorous accident,
your dear papa's article on Skerryvore. And I read the whole of that,
and very impudent it is, but you must not tell your dear papa I said so,
or it might come to a battle in which you might lose either a dear papa
or a valued correspondent, or both, which would be prodigal. And still
no breakfast; so I said 'Let's write to Tomarcher.'
This is a much better place for children than any I have hitherto seen
in these seas. The girls (and sometimes the boys) play a very elaborate
kind of hopscotch. The boys play horses exactly as we do in Europe; and
have very good fun on stilts, trying to knock each other down, in which
they do not often succeed. The children of all ages go to church and
are allowed to do what they please, running about the aisles, rolling
balls, stealing mamma's bonnet and publicly sitting on it, and at last
going to sleep in the middle of the floor. I forgot to say that the
whips to play horses, and the balls to roll about the church—at least I
never saw them used elsewhere—grow ready made on trees; which is rough
on toy-shops. The whips are so good that I wanted to play horses myself;
but no such luck! my hair is grey, and I am a great, big, ugly man. The
balls are rather hard, but very light and quite round. When you grow
up and become offensively rich, you can charter a ship in the port of
London, and have it come back to you entirely loaded with these balls;
when you could satisfy your mind as to their character, and give them
away when done with to your uncles and aunts. But what I really wanted
to tell you was this: besides the tree-top toys (Hush-a-by, toy-shop,
on the tree-top!), I have seen some real _made_ toys, the first hitherto
observed in the South Seas.
This was how. You are to imagine a four-wheeled gig; one horse; in the
front seat two Tahiti natives, in their Sunday clothes, blue coat,
white shirt, kilt (a little longer than the Scotch) of a blue stuff
with big white or yellow flowers, legs and feet bare; in the back seat
me and my wife, who is a friend of yours; under our feet, plenty of
lunch and things; among us a great deal of fun in broken Tahitian, one
of the natives, the sub-chief of the village, being a great ally of
mine. Indeed we have exchanged names; so that he is now called Rui, the
nearest they can come to Louis, for they have no _l_ and no _s_ in their
language. Rui is six feet three in his stockings, and a magnificent
man. We all have straw hats, for the sun is strong. We drive between
the sea, which makes a great noise, and the mountains; the road is cut
through a forest mostly of fruit trees, the very creepers, which take
the place of our ivy, heavy with a great and delicious fruit, bigger
than your head and far nicer, called Barbedine. Presently we came to a
house in a pretty garden, quite by itself, very nicely kept, the doors
and windows open, no one about, and no noise but that of the sea. It
looked like a house in a fairy-tale, and just beyond we must ford a
river, and there we saw the inhabitants. Just in the mouth of the river,
where it met the sea waves, they were ducking and bathing and screaming
together like a covey of birds: seven or eight little naked brown boys
and girls as happy as the day was long; and on the banks of the stream
beside them, real toys—toy ships, full rigged, and with their sails
set, though they were lying in the dust on their beam ends. And then
I knew for sure they were all children in a fairy-story, living alone
together in that lonely house with the only toys in all the island; and
that I had myself driven, in my four-wheeled gig, into a corner of the
fairy-story, and the question was, should I get out again? But it was
all right; I guess only one of the wheels of the gig had got into the
fairy-story; and the next jolt the whole thing vanished, and we drove on
in our sea-side forest as before, and I have the honor to be Tomarcher's
valued correspondent, TERIITERA, which he was previously known as