d spreading; but these potatoes are merely used for the pigs,
the people only eating those grown in their open patches.

Beans of a big coarse-growing sort, with large pods from 8 to 18 inches
long, are planted by women about September by the garden fences of the
potato and yam gardens, and allowed to creep up these fences. They
furnish edible fruit in about three or four months from the time of
planting, and are then gathered by the women. Only the inside seeds
are eaten (not the pod); and even these are so hard that twenty--four
hours' boiling does not soften them--indeed, they are usually roasted.

Pandanus trees are grown in the bush and not in the gardens. The _ine_
which is a large form (Plate 80), is always grown at a height of not
less than 5,000 feet; but there is a smaller one which is grown by
a river or stream. The _malage_ is always grown in the valleys near
brooks and rivers.

As regards the gardens generally, they may be roughly divided into
sweet potato gardens and yam gardens. In the former are also grown
bananas, sugar-cane, beans, pumpkin, cucumber and maize; and in the
latter taro and beans, and the reed plant with the asparagus flavour
to which I have already referred. The general tending of the bananas
and sugar-canes, and to a certain extent the yams, is done by men;
but in other respects the garden produce is looked after by women,
who also attend to the weeding and keeping of the gardens clean,
the men looking after the fences.

Having planted a certain crop in a garden, they let it go on until
it is exhausted, the period for this being different for different
crops; but afterwards they never again plant the same crop in the same
garden. When a crop is exhausted, they may possibly use the same garden
for some other purpose; but as a rule they do not do so, except as
regards the use of old potato gardens for banana and sugar-cane. When
fresh gardens are wanted, fresh portions of bush are cleared; and the
old deserted gardens are quickly re-covered by nature with fresh bush,
the growth of vegetation being very rapid. Most of the gardens are bush
gardens, and, though these may sometimes be close to the village, you
do not find a regular system of gardens within the village clearing,
as you do in the Mekeo district, the situations of the villages being
indeed hardly adapted for this.

CHAPTER XIII

Bark Cloth Making, Netting and Art.

Bark Cloth Making and Netting.

I put the t