and the taro. And clothes! The fools taught us that the pareu, which left the body exposed to the air, clean and refreshed by the sun and the winds, was immodest. We exchanged it for undershirts and trousers and dresses and shoes and stockings and coats, and got disease and death and degeneration.

"You are late, my friend," the princess went on, with a note of pity in her soft voice. "My mother remem"My mother remembered the days Loti depicted in 'Rarahu.' My grandmother knew little Rarahu of Bora-Bora of whom he wrote. Viaud was then a midshipWe did not call him Loti, but Roti, our coined word for a rose, because he had rosy cheeks. But he could not call himself Roti in his novel, for in French, his language, that meant roasted, and one might think of bœuf à la rôti. We have no 'I' in Tahitian."

man.

She lay at full length, her uptilted face in her hands, and her perfect feet raised now and then in unaware accentuation of her words.

"What Tahitian women there were then! Read the old French writers! None was a pigmy. When they stood under the waterfall the water ran off their skins as off a marble table. Not a drop stayed on. They were as smooth as glass."

Fragrance of the Jasmine sighed.
"Aue! Hélas!"

I had it in my mouth to say that she was as beautiful and as smoothskinned as any of her forebears. She was as enticing as imaginable, her languorous eyes alight as she spoke, and her bare limbs moving in the vigor of her thoughts. But I could not think of anything in French or English not banal, and my Tahitian

was yet too limited to permit me to tutoyer her. She was an islander, but she had seen the Midnight Follies and the Bal Bullier, the carnival in Nice, and once, New Year's eve in San Francisco, an Italian and a Scandinavian prince had wooed her.

I spoke of Loti again, and of other writers' comments upon the attitude of women in Tahiti toward man.

The princess sat up and adjusted her hei of ferns. She studied a minute, and then she said:

"The Tahitian woman makes the first advances in friendship openly, if she chooses. She arranges time and place for amours as your women do. She does not take from the Tahitian man or from the foreigner his right to choose, but she chooses herself, too. I feel sure that often an American woman would give hours of pain to know well a certain man, but makes no honest effort to draw him toward her. They have told me so."

I got up, and standing beside her, I quoted:

"Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing;

Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;

So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,

Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence."

"Mais, c'est vrai," she said musingly. "The Tahitian woman will not endure that."

Her long, black lashes touched her cheeks.

"We are a little sleepy, n'est-ce pas?” she asked. "B'en, we will have a taoto."

She made herself a pillow of leaves with her pareu, and arranging her

hair in two braids, she stretched herself out, with her face toward the sky, and a cool banana-leaf laid over it. I copied her action, and lulled by the falling water, the rippling of the pool, and the drowsy rustling of the trees, I fell fast asleep, and dreamed of Eve and the lotus-eaters.

When I awoke, the princess was refreshing her face and hands in the water.

anced on a pole over his shoulder, and with this he was to go seven or eight miles from their place of growth. He was a pillar of strength, handsome, glowing with effort, clad in a gorgeous pareu of red, and as we went by him, he smiled and said, "Ia ora na. I hea? Vaimato?"

"Greeting! Where have you been? The waterfall?”

"E, hitahita. Yes, we are hurrying

In the mist above the pool at the foot of the cascade a double rainbow gleamed brilliantly. O tane is the man, which the Tahitians call the real arch, and O vahine, the woman, the reflected bow. They appeared and disappeared with the movement of the tiny, fleecy clouds about the sun. The air, as dewy as early morn in the braes o' Maxwelton, was deliciously cool.

But Fragrance of the Jasmine ended my reverie. She slapped her thigh.

"I dine and dance to-night at eight o'clock," she said. “A rohi! We must go! Besides, Maru, it grows cool here at night. The mercury goes to sixty of your thermometer."

"Those are our real men, not the Papeete dolts," she said. “If we had time, we would catch shrimp in the river. I love to do that.”

When we came to where the habitations began and the road became passable for vehicles, Noanoa Tiare sat down on a stone. She put on her pale-blue silk stockings and her shoes, and asked me for the package she had given me at starting. She unfolded it, and it was an aahu, a gown, for which she exchanged, behind a bananaplant, her soiled and drenched tunic. The new one was of the finest silk, diaphanous, and thus to be worn only at night. The sun was down, and the lagoon a purple lake when we were again at the bust of Bougainville.

I thanked her at parting.

"Noanoa Tiare," I said, "this day has a heavenly blue page in my record. It has made Tahiti a different island for me."

"Maru, mon ami, you are sympathetic to my race. We shall be dear friends. I will send you the note to Tetuanui, the chief of Mataiea, toAu revoir and happy

morrow.

P on the thirty-first parallel of south latitude, three hundred and sixty miles north of Montevideo, there is a town of divided allegiance, which is situated in both the smallest and the largest country of South America. When the traveler disembarks in it from the "Uruguay Central," he finds it is named for Colonel Rivera, the Custer of Uruguay, who made the last stand against the Charrúa Indians and was killed by them in 1832. But as he goes strolling along the main street, gazing idly into the shop-windows, he notes all at once that the signs in them have changed both in words and prices, that even the street has an entirely different name; for instead of being the "Calle Principal" it has become the "Rua Sete de Septembro," and suddenly he awakens to the fact that instead of taking a stroll in the town of Rivera, in the República Oriental del Uruguay, as he fancied, he has wandered into Santa Anna do Livramento, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, in the United States of Brazil.

He is aware, too, that another atmosphere has suddenly grown up about him. Negroes and piccaninnies, and the unpainted makeshift shacks that commonly go with them, are scattered all over the landscape; oxen with the yokes on their necks rather than in front of their horns, each pair of animals tied together with leather thongs through holes in the ends of the

horns, testify to a change from Spanish to Portuguese custom; instead of the pretty little plaza, with its well-kept promenades, its comfortable benches, and its well-tended flower plots that forms the center of Rivera or any other Spanish-American town that has the slightest personal pride, there is a praça, muddy, untended, seatless, and unadorned. The sun, too, has begun to bite again in a way unfamiliar in the countries of southern and temperate South America.

There is no definite line of demarcation between Rivera and Santa Anna do Livramento. The international boundary runs through the center of a foot-ball-field, and climbs up over a knoll on the top of which sits a stone boundary-post, the two countries rolling away together over plump hills densely green in color except where the enamel of nature has been chipped off to disclose a reddish, sandy soil similar to that in Asunción, Paraguay. Surely, Brazil, stretching for thirtyseven degrees of latitude from Uruguay to the Guianas, a distance as great as from Key West to the north of Labrador, with five thousand miles of Atlantic coast, and with a width of nearly as many degrees of longitude from Pernambuco to the Andes, covering considerably more space than the continental United States, is large enough so that its inhabitants need not have crowded their huts to the very edge of the boundary-line in this

fashion, as if they were fleeing from their oppressive rulers, or were determined that little Uruguay should not thrust her authority an inch farther north.

$ 2

The daily train northward leaves Santa Anna at seven-thirty-five, which is seven by Uruguayan time, and I was dragged out of bed at an unearthly hour, in the midwinter days of June, to find the world weighed down under a dense, bone-soaking blanket of fog. The street lamps of both countries, judging daylight by the calendar rather than by the facts, kept going out just half a block ahead of me as I stumbled on through the impenetrable gloom, the streets by no means improving at the frontier. I might have crossed this without formality had I not chosen to wake the negro guard from a sound sleep in his kiosk and insist upon his doing his duty. One would fancy that an official stationed five feet from a Spanish-speaking country would pick up a few words of that language, yet these custom-house negroes professed not to understand a word of Spanish, no matter how much it sounded like their native Portuguese. At length, with a growl for having been disturbed, the swarthy guardian waved a hand at me in a bored, tropical way, drew his resplendent cloak about him again, and stretched out once more on his wooden bench.

It was a long mile of slippery mud and warm humidity to the station, where black night still reigned and where yet another African official came to revisar my baggage, for much contraband passes this frontier in both directions. Finally, something resembling daybreak forced its reluctant

way through the gray mass that hung over and crept into everything, and our narrow-gage half-freight took to bumping uncertainly northward. What a change from the clean, comfortable, equal-to-anywhere trains of Uruguay! Even our primeiro, with its two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other, was as untidy, unmended, and slovenly as the government railways of Chile, and every mile forward seemed to bring one that much nearer the heart of happy-go-lucky Latin America.

I wrapped myself in all the garments I possessed, regretting that I owned no overcoat, as we shivered jerkily onward across a wild, shaggy, mist-heavy country inhabited only by cattle and water, with all the morning no stopping-place except Rosario entitled to consider itself a town. consider itself a town. I fell to reading the newspaper of a day or two before from Porto Alegre, the capital of this estado gaucho, or "cow-boy state," the southernmost of Brazil and considerably larger than the entire republic of Uruguay. As I could usually guess the meaning of the language spoken about me, so I read Portuguese as a man skates over thin ice: as long as I kept swiftly going, all was well; but if I stopped to examine a word closely, I was lost. The instant one steps over the line into Brazil he is surrounded by the Portuguese tongue, so like, yet so different from, the Spanish of the rest of South America. It is an unpleasant language to listen to, at least for the man long accustomed to Spanish, compared with which it is turgid, muddy, indistinct of sound, quite unlike the incisive, clear-cut Spanish. Yet the Brazilians are inordinately proud of it; so proud that although any Brazilian of human intelligence can understand Spanish if he

About noon we tumbled out of our rattling conveyance at Cacequy, and took another train, on the line to Porto Alegre. It rambled in and about some very low hills, with an excellent grazing country spread out to the horizon on every hand, and at four, or, rather, sixteen o'clock, set us down at the considerable town of Santa Maria. I was privileged to occupy Room No. 1 in the chief hotel of the town, which was no doubt a high honor; but as it chanced to be situated between the front door of the building and the cobbled entrance corridor, with either window or door opening directly on crowds of impudent newsboys, lotteryvenders, and servants, it was not unlike being between the devil-or at least a swarm of his progeny-and the deep sea. Indeed, it rapidly became evident that Brazilian hotels of the interior would prove no better than those in the three southern countries of South America. The meals never vary an iota, whether in the smallest backwoods town, the largest city outside the capital, or the dining-cars or station restaurants, beginning unfailingly with fiambre, or thin slices of cold meat, through several dishes of hot meat, down to the inevitable dulce de membrillo, or hard quince jelly, which is the sad ending of all meals. To increase my gloom, the thieving French madame, every glance from whom caused my thin pocket-book to writhe in agony, manipulated the items so cleverly that, though placards on the

walls announced the rate as seven milreis a day, and I was there only from sunset until a little after sunrise, she handed me a bill for 13,500 reis!

Luckily, I had already weathered the first shock of the traveler who comes rudely into contact with the Brazilian money system. But as I paid the miser-faced old French proprietress in a daze, I went away to a quiet corner to figure up the exact extent of the disaster that had befallen me. On due reflection, however, it proved to be not quite so overwhelming as it had sounded. The monetary unit is the Portuguese real, though in theory only, for no such coin exists; hence in practice only the plural reis is used, and the unit is really the milreis, or one thousand reis. For some years the milreis had remained at the fixed value of fifteen to the English pound, or about 3250 reis to the American dollar. In larger transactions the unit is the conto, one million reis. Gold is never seen in circulation in Brazil. From the milreis to the conto there are paper notes, usually printed in New York, silver coins from five hundred to two thousand reis, and nickel pieces of four, two, and one hundred, the last the tostão of popular parlance. The Brazilian places his dollar-sign after the milreis and before the reis, so that 3$250 means the equivalent of a whole dollar, and the man who pays $500 for a newspaper or a small glass of iced cane-juice does not feel that he has been unusually extravagant, at least if he has lived long enough in Brazil to get the local point of view.

84

The three southern states of Brazil are on an elevated plateau that makes them excellent cereal and fruit regions