the end of the rickety pier, that once (in the prosperous days of the

American rebellion) was used to groan under the cotton of John Hart,

there might have been spied upon a pile of lumber the famous tattooed

white man, the living curiosity of Tai-o-hae.

His eyes were open, staring down the bay. He saw the mountains droop,

as they approached the entrance, and break down in cliffs; the surf boil

white round the two sentinel islets; and between, on the narrow bight

of blue horizon, Ua-pu upraise the ghost of her pinnacled mountain tops.

But his mind would take no account of these familiar features; as he

dodged in and out along the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory

would serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown faces and

white, of skipper and shipmate, king and chief, would arise before his

mind and vanish; he would recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour

of dawn; he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating festival;

perhaps he would summon up the form of that island princess for the love

of whom he had submitted his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer,

and now sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange

a figure of a European. Or perhaps from yet further back, sounds and

scents of England and his childhood might assail him: the merry clamour

of cathedral bells, the broom upon the foreland, the song of the river

on the weir.

It is bold water at the mouth of the bay; you can steer a ship about

either sentinel, close enough to toss a biscuit on the rocks. Thus

it chanced that, as the tattooed man sat dozing and dreaming, he was

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