_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 cocoa-nut 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 honour to be Tomarcher’s valued correspondent, TERIITEPA,
which he was previously known as