that the natives
are so lacking in enterprise, this product alone might be made a very
large source of profit. The deep green foliage of the bread-fruit all
along the shore indicated the abundance of this natural food-supply of
the islanders. Together with the yam and taro it forms their main
support. The last named is called the daily bread of the Samoans, just
as the poi forms the main sustenance of the Hawaiians.

The Samoans are fine-looking specimens of the savage races of the South
Pacific. The men are broad-shouldered and athletic, the women by no
means ugly, and certainly graceful. They have very little if any of the
flat nose and protruding lips of the African race. Their complexion is a
light brown, "the livery of the burnished sun," the women exhibiting a
warm rosy hue upon their smooth, well-rounded faces. The bodies of both
sexes are more or less elaborately tattooed in blue.

If tattooing constituted costume, of which in fact it takes the place
here, the Samoans would be gorgeously clad, as they certainly excel in
this respect the Maoris of New Zealand. This sort of savage
ornamentation with the latter people is more confined to the face, which
the Samoans neglect only to be more elaborate upon the limbs and body.
It is really surprising to what pain and inconvenience the barbaric
races of the Pacific Islands put themselves in order to gratify their
vanity and conform to local fashion. The process of tattooing is a slow
agony; but the laws of fashion are as imperious in the Cannibal Islands
as upon the Parisian boulevards. The tedious and painful operation of
tattooing is performed by professionals, who make a paying business of
it. The skin is punctured by an instrument made of bone, or by spines of
the shaddock-tree, while the dye injected is usually obtained by boiling
the candle-nut. Among some of the Pacific tribes tattooing is considered
religiously binding; by others it is adopted purely for fancy's sake.

The men wear their hair twisted up in little spiral horns, reminding one
of the natives of the coast who meet the steamers at the mouth of the
Red Sea, and who exhibit the same aptness in diving for silver coins.
The women wear their hair rather short, and are given to dressing their
heads and necks with flowers,--a similar fancy to that already described
as connected with the Hawaiians. The missionaries have taught the women
when they are on shore to wear a small strip of cloth with a hole in t