Before going back to the steamer, which was to sail in a few hours, I bathed in the sea, in a warm azure sea, and then, after eating more bananas and a delicious bitter fruit called “Brazilian cherries,” I went on board once more. From Roratonga it only takes two days to get to the island of Tahiti, and the steamer anchored at Papeete on Friday, the 20th September. Roratonga gives you a kind of foretaste of the whole charm and beauty of the South Seas. It is the appetizer, the _hors-d’œuvre_, not the whole meal. Tahiti is the whole thing; the real thing; the thing one has dreamt about all one’s life; the thing which made Stevenson leave Europe forever. All tellers of fairy tales, and all poets from Homer downwards, have always imagined the existence of certain islands which were so full of magic and charm that they turned man from his duty and from all tasks, labour, or occupation in which he was engaged, and held him a willing captive, who would not sell his captivity for all the prizes of the busy world. Stevenson in one of his books--“The Wrecker,” I think--says that if a man who was toiling in some English town were to be suddenly transported to one of the South Sea Islands, in the neighbourhood of Tahiti, and had a vision of the beauty that is there, and then were to be transported back again to his prosaic and ugly surroundings, he would say, “At any rate, I have had my dream.” That is how one feels when one has seen Tahiti. One feels one has had one’s dream. The Bay of Papeete curves inward. As you sail into it you are sure to see several white schooners at anchor. At one side is a range of light-blue volcanic hills stretching out into the crystalline sea, reminding one of Naples, Capri, and Sorrento, and in the middle of the bay there is a tiny little island, consisting of a few cocoa palms. The sea is a transparent azure; little white houses are dotted all along the line of the beach, nestling in greenery. We got there in the afternoon and landed at once. We walked along the beach into the little town, and into the suburbs of it. It was spring in Tahiti, and every kind of imaginable blossom was flaunting its reckless and extravagant beauty. Everything grows wild in Tahiti. Nobody seems to bother about gardening or anything of that kind. It is not only the lilies who do not toil and spin, but the gardeners also. The unaided results of nature are so prodigious that the imagination is staggered to think of what might be done supposing an energetic gardener were let loose in these islands and allowed to try experiments. He would produce such a garden as the world has never seen.