The wages, for this island, are rather high. An ordinary laborer is paid seventy-five cents a day, and the women who are willing to work can earn fifty cents a day. The average Tahitian works only long enough to procure the necessities of life, and, as these are few, it is difficult to find men and women for ordinary labor and housework.
The fact that there is no bank in the whole island shows that the amount of money which circulates among the people is very small. Some enterprising American attempted to establish a telephone line encircling the island, but lack of patronage soon paralyzed the undertaking. The island is a place for a dreamy, easy existence, and not for business.
The communication with the outside world is carried on by two regular steamer lines, one from San Francisco, the other from Auckland, but both of these lines are supported by liberal government subsidies to make them remunerative, as the passenger traffic and the exports and imports of the island would not suffice to make them independent of government aid.
OLD TAHITI
What will not length of time be able to change?
CLAUDIANUS.
Tahiti is exceedingly interesting to-day, but how much more so must it have been to Captain Wallis and his crew, who first set their eyes on this gem of the Pacific! When the Dolphin came in sight of this beautiful island that never before had been seen by a white man, we can readily imagine officers and crew straining their eyes to see first its rugged outlines, and later the details of the wonderful landscapes. Under the blue sky and lighted up by the vigorous rays of the tropic sun, they could see the mountain-peaks clothed in the verdure of a tropic forest, the little island set like a gem in the ocean, and, as they beheld these mountains and turned their eyes upward they could also see
They were canopied by the blue sky, so cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful that God alone was to be seen in heaven.
BYRON.
TAHITIAN GIRL IN NATIVE FESTIVE DRESS
As they approached nearer and saw the natural wealth of the island and its happy inhabitants basking in the sunshine, eating what Nature had provided for them without care or toil on their part, they must have come to the unavoidable conclusion that they at last had found a land where