Chapter I: Preface

For some months past, my daily stint at the typewriter has been cheered by an ambitious hope: that this story might prove entertaining to the young--the finest of all audiences. They are too wise even to glance at so dull a thing as a preface, but to you older people, who are responsible for what the young ones read, I have a word to say.

I make no claim, in the pages which follow, to have done more than muster the familiar marionettes and put them through their paces before your eyes. In one respect, nevertheless, I venture to commit myself. I know the islands fairly well--white man and native; skipper, trader, and pearl-diver; the sea, the lagoons, the small and lonely bits of land; and I can vouch for the genuineness of the story's atmosphere.

As for the story, there is nothing in it which has not happened, or might not happen to-day--for Romance, like the sea itself, is ever old and ever new.

C. N.

TAHITI, 1924

CONTENTS

I. The Coming of the Schooner
II. The Pearls of Iriatai
III. Aboard the Tara
IV. At Faatemu
V. Iriatai
VI. The End of the Shark--the Beginning of the Diving
VII. South Sea Fishermen
VIII. I Turn Pearl-Diver
IX. The Cave of the Shark-God
X. The Cholita Comes to Iriatai
XI. Piracy
XII. Boarders!
XIII. Tahiti

ILLUSTRATIONS

_I had my first look at the helmsman_ . . . . . . Frontispiece

"_You're Charlie, eh?_" _he said, when he had looked me up and down with a smile that took me back to the evenings by our fireside, ten years before_

_The shark reared almost vertically beneath the swimmer and, opened his great jaws_

_Next moment the wave burst over the gunwale, and we were struggling in the sea_

THE PEARL LAGOON

_O Kahiki, land of the far-reaching ocean,
Land where Olopana dwelt!
Within is the land, outside is the sun!
Indistinct are the sun and the land when approaching.
Perhaps you have seen it?
I have seen it.
I have surely seen Kahiki._