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Hitihiti’s daughter—mother of two of the younger children accompanying us—met us at the door. She was a young woman of twenty-five, with a stately figure and carriage, and the pale golden skin and auburn hair which are not uncommon among this people. These fair Indians were termed ebu; I have seen men and women of this strain—unmixed with European blood—whose eyes were blue. My host smiled at his daughter and then at me.

“O Hina,” he said in introduction. He said something to her in which I distinguished the word taio and my own name. Hina stepped forward with a grave slow smile to shake my hand, and then, taking me by the shoulders as her father had done, she laid her nose to my cheek and sniffed. I reciprocated this Indian kiss, and smelled for the first time the perfume of the scented coconut oil with which the women of Tahiti anoint themselves.

There are perhaps no women in the world—not even the greatest ladies of fashion in Europe—more meticulous in the care of their persons than were the Indian women of the upper class. Each morning and evening they bathed in one of the innumerable clear cool streams, not merely plunging in and out again, but stopping to be scrubbed from head to foot by their serving women with a porous volcanic stone, used as we use pumice in our baths. Their servants then anointed them with monoi—coconut oil, perfumed with the petals of the Tahitian gardenia. Their hair was dried and arranged, a task which required an hour or more; their eyebrows were examined in a mirror which consisted of a blackened coconut shell filled with water, and plucked or shaven with a shark’s tooth, to make the slender arch which was the fashion among them. A servant then brought a supply of powdered charcoal with which the teeth were scrubbed. When they were ready to dress, the skirt, or pareu, which reached from waist to the knees and was of snow-white bark cloth, was adjusted so that each fold hung in a certain fashion. Then came the cloak, which was worn to protect the upper part of the body from sunburn, which the ladies of Tahiti dreaded quite as much as the ladies of the English Court. Each fold of the cloak was arranged just so, and it was ridiculous—to a man, at least—to watch the long efforts of a tirewoman to please her mistress in this respect.