e _malanga_ sets forth, the same welcome
and the same joys expect them beyond the next cape, where the nearest
village nestles in its grove of palms. To the visitors it is all golden;
for the hosts, it has another side. In one or two words of the language
the fact peeps slyly out. The same word (_afemoeina_) expresses "a long
call" and "to come as a calamity"; the same word (_lesolosolou_)
signifies "to have no intermission of pain" and "to have no cessation, as
in the arrival of visitors"; and _soua_, used of epidemics, bears the
sense of being overcome as with "fire, flood, or visitors." But the gem
of the dictionary is the verb _alovao_, which illustrates its pages like
a humorous woodcut. It is used in the sense of "to avoid visitors," but
it means literally "hide in the wood." So, by the sure hand of popular
speech, we have the picture of the house deserted, the _malanga_
disappointed, and the host that should have been quaking in the bush.

We are thus brought to the beginning of a series of traits of manners,
highly curious in themselves, and essential to an understanding of the
war. In Samoa authority sits on the one hand entranced; on the other,
property stands bound in the midst of chartered marauders. What property
exists is vested in the family, not in the individual; and of the loose
communism in which a family dwells, the dictionary may yet again help us
to some idea. I find a string of verbs with the following senses: to
deal leniently with, as in helping oneself from a family plantation; to
give away without consulting other members of the family; to go to
strangers for help instead of to relatives; to take from relatives
without permission; to steal from relatives; to have plantations robbed
by relatives. The ideal of conduct in the family, and some of its
depravations, appear here very plainly. The man who (in a native word of
praise) is _mata-ainga_, a race-regarder, has his hand always open to his
kindred; the man who is not (in a native term of contempt) _noa_, knows
always where to turn in any pinch of want or extremity of laziness.
Beggary within the family--and by the less self-respecting, without
it--has thus grown into a custom and a scourge, and the dictionary teems
with evidence of its abuse. Special words signify the begging of food,
of uncooked food, of fish, of pigs, of pigs for travellers, of pigs for
stock, of taro, of taro-tops, of taro-tops for planting, of tools, of
flyhook