them are the cultivated grounds producing
the banana, plantain, melon, yam, taro, sweet potatoes, _tee_-tree,
cloth-plant, with other useful roots, fruits, and a variety of shrubs.
Every cottage has its out-house for making cloth, its baking-place, its
pig-sty, and its poultry-house.

During the stay of the strangers on the island, they dined sometimes
with one person, and sometimes with another, their meals being always
the same, and consisting of baked pig, yams, and taro, and sometimes
sweet potatoes. Goats are numerous on the island, but neither their
flesh nor their milk is relished by the natives. Yams constitute their
principal food, either boiled, baked, or mixed with cocoa-nut, made into
cakes, and eaten with molasses extracted from the tee-root. Taro-root is
no bad substitute for bread; and bananas, plantains, and _appoi_, are
wholesome and nutritive fruits. The common beverage is water, but they
make tea from the tee-plant, flavoured with ginger, and sweetened with
the juice of the sugar-cane. They but seldom kill a pig, living mostly
on fruit and vegetables. With this simple diet, early rising, and taking
a great deal of exercise, they are subject to few diseases; and Captain
Beechey says, 'they are certainly a finer and more athletic race than is
usually found among the families of mankind.'

The young children are punctual in their attendance at school, and are
instructed by John Buffet in reading, writing, and arithmetic; to which
are added, precepts of religion and morality, drawn chiefly from the
Bible and Prayer Book; than which, fortunately, they possess no others
that might mystify and perplex their understandings on religious
subjects. They seldom indulge in jokes or other kinds of levity; and
Beechey says, they are so accustomed to take what is said in its literal
meaning, that irony was always considered a falsehood in spite of
explanation; and that they could not see the propriety of uttering what
was not strictly true, for any purpose whatever. The Sabbath is wholly
devoted to the church service, to prayer, reading, and serious
meditation; no work of any kind is done on that day, not even cooking,
which is prepared on the preceding evening.

'I attended,' says Beechey, 'their church on this day, and found the
service well conducted; the prayers were read by Adams, and the lessons
by Buffet, the service being preceded by hymns. The greatest devotion
was apparent in every individual; and in the