in the published letters of his mother it is written of at length, and most entertainingly.

of Tahiti.

From Mrs. Stevenson's account it would appear that the party was tendered the usual round of feasts, dances and gifts, and countered with feasts and gift-givings of its own. They tell you in Papette that Stevenson's illness during this visit made him see their island through dark glasses, and that this was the reason that he ultimately settled in Samoa instead From the standpoint of picturesque and tropical loveliness, Tautira, and even Papeete, is distinctly ahead of Apia, but it is more likely that the greater attractiveness of the incomparable Samoan native who, then as now, was much less touched by white in fluence than the Tahitian, turned the scale in favor of the more westerly location of the novelist's home.

Ori-a wily old hypocrite whose six feet four of stature, unlike that of most Tahitians, was not cumbered with an ounce of superfluous flesh-made a great point of assuring our party that his whole plan of entertainment was Fatterned on that which he had provided for the Stevensons. We were quartered in one of the houses that the Stevensons had occupied; quite as many pigs and chickens were slaughtered for our native feasts as for those of the Stevensons; full as many singers were mustered for our "sing-sings" as turned out for the Stevensons; he would lavish quite as rich gifts upon us as he did upon the Stevensons, and -the Stevensons had given him such and such things, ad infinitum. Inasmuch as we were paying for our entertainment at a rate which we knew to be about a hundred per cent above the normal, there was little of base ingratitude in the remark of one of our number who, when his knife blade turned on the rubberoid leg of one of Ori's broilers, asked that venerable that venerable rascal if it came from one of the chickens left over by the Stevensons.

For some reason, chickens, like wine, refuse to age properly in the South Pacific. It may be the heat; it

may be the humidity; at any rate, a chicken of any greater age than two months, however cooked, makes a piece de resistance in a most painful literal sense. Luckily, the Tahitian pig, cooked in island fashion, is as much above the average porker of temperate latitudes as the Tahitian broiler falls below the standard in his class. Any kind of a cut from a six months old cocoanut fed pig, cooked on hot stones and served with the inimitable "miti-hari" sauce, will awaken an ecstacy in the palate, the memory of which a year of ordinary food cannot eradicate. The recipe would go something like this:

Dig a hole in the ground big enough comfortably to bury a pig in, and fill it with smooth, round river bottom stones. Collect half a cord or so of dry wood and start a fire on the stones. Leaving a boy to stoke the fire, take the eight or ten hours in which the stones are coming to a dull cherry red to find just the right sort of a pig. From three to six months is the best age, and, if possible, get an animal that has been penned and fed on nothing but young cocoanuts. If there has been a few odd bread-fruits, bananas, mangoes, papayas, mamees, star-apples and the like, thrown in to him occasionally, it will not make much difference, but avoid the porker that has rustled for himself about the copra shacks and along the beach.

Kill the pig and dress in the usual manner, but without cutting off the head and feet, or removing the skin. Wrap the body several inches deep in banana or plantain leaves, and plaster the whole thickly with sticky mud. Now, if the stones are red, remove them with a pole, throw in the pig, and push back the stones again. Best to let a native watch the progress of the cooking, as a great deal depends upon taking it out at the right time, and it requires a lifetime of experience to forecast absolutely the condition of the pig from a whiff of the steam.

You might try your hand with "mitihari" before leaving the rest of the feast for the natives to prepare. This

is the sauce par excellence of the South Pacific, and in my own experience, quite without a peer in any other part of the world. Send for a quart of grated cocoanut meat (most of the native houses keep it on hand), and after soaking it for a few minutes in sea water, pour it out on a square of stout muslin, twist the corners of the latter together and bring all the pressure possible to bear on the contents. The result is a cupful of thick, rich. milk which, on the addition of a couple of limes and a red pepper or two, becomes the marvelous and transmutative "miti-hari."

I recall hearing in Papeete a story of the amazing things that tourists have eaten under the gastronomic intoxication incident to a taste of the wonderful "miti," with which theythe things-were dressed. I believe a piece of rubber blanket was on the list. I don't exactly recall what else, though I do remember hearing some one say

that a dash of "miti-hari" on the story itself might make it easier to swallow.

The Tahitian "native" feast does not differ in any salient particulars from the often described Hawaiian "luau." The guests sit on the ground and eat the various "dishes," which are spread before them on banana leaves, from their fingers. In addition to pig, chicken and the inevitable bread-fruit, the menu always includes a liberal supply of fish, both cooked in wrappings of the fragrant "ti" leaves and pickled raw in lime juice; taro, boiled and mashed; bananas and plantain of a dozen different varieties; fillet of devil fish, fillet of devil fish, very exquisite prawns, and a fruit list which, being harder to write than to eat, is omitted.

If the feast is given you by a person of wealth or importance, or if you are paying a person like the canny Ori a sum sufficient to make it an inducement, you may get a taste of cocoanut sprout salad. The raw fish

is good, the prawns distinctly so, but the cocoanut sprout salad is the only dish of the lot worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the "mitiharied" pig. Unfortunately, as every tiny sprout in the salad means the death of a young cocoanut tree, the dish is more often discussed than digested. A substitute, made of the tender fronds of young ferns, is itself pretty near a high water mark in salads until you have tasted that of cocoanut sprouts. As for the pig and the "miti-hari," if it doesn't prepare your face for a look of distant superiority whenever again you hear men extolling this or that culinary achievement as worthy of a place on the topmost pinnacle of gastronomic excellence, it is because you are suffering from atrophy of the palate.

Kava, so popular in the Samoas and Fiji, was not-Byron to the contraryand is not much drunk in Tahiti. Feasting with natives outside of missionary.

a

circles, you will probably have chance to "experience" orange wine. This is a harmless looking beverage of insinuating ways, in the lucent depths of the first three or four cups of which lurks no hint of the devil which is curled up in the bottom of the fifth or sixth, and all thereafter. The proverbial ungentlemanliness of the onslaught of a "battleship" punch on a debutante at her first dance on board, is nothing to the "assault from ambush" of orange wine upon the unwary stranger who dallies overlong above its cup.

Cocoanut wine, fermented from a juice drawn from the heart of the trunk of that palm, is expensive and hard to obtain at any cost. It is a gentleman's drink, however, with none of the "behind the back" tactics of the soft-footed orange thunderbolt. It romps down the throat like a torchlight procession, and promptly starts a conflagration which spreads like

wildfire from the head to the heels. An American Indian after a couple of drinks of cocoanut wine, would commence murdering his fellows; the gentle Tahitian, in like instance, quite as much uplifted, both mentally and physically, as the Indian, is content to murder sleep-his own and every one else's. He enters upon a period of song and dance, which lasts as long as the supply of wine, and there is no peace within a quarter of a mile radius or farther, according to his numbers.

In America, a man showing the same symptoms as a native under the influence of cocoanut wine, would be gagged, strait-jacketed and thrust in a padded cell. In Tahiti, the smiling policeman, if the offender becomes too boisterously obstreperous, accomplishes a similar result by pitching him off the seawall. This strikes the visitor as being a somewhat drastic proceeding, but I have the assurance of a prominent merchant of Papeete that "you would be surprised how few of these fellows are really drowned."

WILLIAM NAUNS RICKS.