Page:A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War.djvu/345

Rh des fleurs," as Madame Valles describes her daily task, is no sinecure; it must be done during the hottest hours of the day, when any exertion is most exhausting. It needs a keen eye to detect each fresh blossom, and any neglected flower withers and drops. Each day the ripening pods must be gathered, and in dry weather the plants require frequent watering—an indescribable toil.

This morning Madame Valles let me accompany her on her morning rounds, whereby I realised that toil and hardship are to be found even in paradise.

We returned to breakfast, which was served by an old French soldier—a garrulous old fellow, and evidently quite a "character." Apparently his life is a burden to him, by reason of the multitude of half-tamed animals which swarm about the place. In the dining-room were three old and six young cats; two large, three medium, and many small dogs,—all hungrily clamouring for food, and only kept off the table by the free use of a large, resounding whip.

In the afternoon M. Brun came in search of me, and we rode to the head of the bay, where there is a beautiful estate, and large comfortable house, built many years ago by an English planter, who failed, and the place was bought by Dr Michelli, an Italian, who chanced just then to be conveying a cargo of Chinese coolies to Peru. So many died on the voyage that he determined to halt at Tahiti, and give the survivors time to recruit. Finding this very desirable property in the market, he concluded that the part of wisdom was to go no further. So here he settled with about fifty Chinamen, who work the land and give him a third of the profits, while he rides about the mountains, and shoots wild cattle for their common use.

His surroundings are somewhat polyglot. The cook is an Englishman; servants of various degree are Tahitian; while the overseer, M. Bellemare, is a French externe-politique, who was exiled for firing at the late Emperor Louis Napoleon—a crime which the Emperor seems to have punished on the Biblical principle of heaping coals of fire, in the form of unmerited reward; for during his lifetime M. Bellemare received a regular pension and lived on the