A body leaped out of bed in an inner room, and a pair of blue eyes under brown hair, an earnest face, supported by an athletic figure in pajamas, rushed out. The owner seized my hand.
“I’ll be doggoned! I didn’t know anything was in sight. The Marara! Any mail for me? Come in, and we’ll dress.”
The king’s daughter had fled when the missionaries appeared. I entered the living-room and found a chair, while the elders flooded me with questions from their sleeping quarters, as they put on their clothes. While I answered, I looked at the home of this foremost of the Paumotuans, whose father and mother had eaten their kind.
A dining-room table and half a dozen cheap chairs were all the furniture. South Sea Islanders found sitting in chairs uncomfortable, and these were plainly guest seats, for governors and pearl-buyers and missionaries.
The walls held prints curiously antagonistic. Brigham Young, founder of the Utah Mormon colony, with a curly white beard, smooth upper lip, and glorified countenance, sat in an arm-chair, holding a walking-stick of size, with a gilded head. A splendiferous colored lithograph of the temple at Salt Lake flanked the portrait.
On the other wall was a double pink page from a New York gazette, usually found in barber-shops and on boot-black stands, with pictures of two prize-fighters, Jeffries and Johnson, one white and the other black, glaring viciously at each other, and with threatening gloved fists. Beneath this picture was in handwriting:
Teferite e Tihonitone
na
Taata Moto
Emerging from their bedroom, the elders caught my eyes fastened on the pink page, and they looked grieved, as housewives whose kitchen is found in disorder.