At a little hotel where I stopped to eat some fresh bananas (and, oh, the difference between the fresh bananas and those which one buys at a store in Europe!) the woman who kept the hotel, and who had come from South Africa, talked of the natives. She said: “It is impossible to get them to work. If you find any fault with them they go away. It is we poor white people who have to do all the work. I would like,” she said, “to shambok them as they do in South Africa, so lazy and impossible they are sometimes, but we are not allowed to touch them. But then,” she added, “of course one can’t blame them, because they are quite well off without working. They have got enough to live on without doing any work.” I thought that it would, indeed, be unreasonable to blame these natives for not slaving for white people if they were not obliged to do so. The fact is that in these islands work for the natives is not a necessity; it is a hobby. It is to them what gardening must have been to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in the days before the Fall. If Adam and Eve gardened then, they gardened for fun. After the Fall of Man, they had to garden for a living and not from choice. Well, the native inhabitants of the South Sea Islands seem to have escaped or to be exempted from the primal curse; in fact, I believe that the islands of Tahiti and Roratonga are two bits of the Garden of Eden which were allowed to remain in the world so as to show mankind what they had lost by Eve’s curiosity, Adam’s disobedience, and the Devil’s spite. We walked along the coast of this island up to the house of the missionary, where there was a large field. The football boys wanted to practise. We certainly envied the missionary his house. It stood under a huge shelving hill covered with palm-trees, in a perfect labyrinth of flowers. When the boys began to play football, the natives came in great crowds and stood round chirping with delight like birds; and when the boys had finished practising, they threw the football to the natives and told them they might play. At first, the natives fought shy of the football,--I imagine that they thought they would have to play against these terrifically efficient and muscular representatives of New South Wales; but when they realised that the boys did not want to play with them, and that they could play among themselves, they took to the game with great eagerness, and were soon enjoying themselves greatly. It was curious that by just looking on they had picked up a very good idea of the game, the main features of which they mimicked with some skill; one little boy was an excellent tackler. One was struck by the extraordinarily musical quality of their voices and their language, which consists almost entirely of soft open vowels, and which is, I suppose, the most melodious of all human languages.