Chap, xiii.] A CHIEF'S HOUSE. 283 



sionary Society, by the natives. Such dancing performances 

 used ahvays to be held when the annual tribute was paid over 

 to the chiefs, and dancing on their collection days has been 

 encouraged by the missionaries. The policy of the Wesleyan 

 Society in Fiji is very different from that maintained by the 

 missionaries in Tonga, where dancing is suppressed. 



The village was full of visitors, and everyone was dressed in 

 his best. The Dancing Green in front of the chief's house was 

 cleared, and a white tappa flag was stuck up in the centre. 

 We called on the chief, and found him sitting on his mat in 

 a fine large house, about 40 feet long by 20 broad, 10 feet in 

 height to the slope of the roof, and 25 feet to the ridge pole. 

 The house was built of a wooden frame, the rafters and beams 

 being secured with plaited cocoanut fibre or sennet. The walls 

 were of reed, the roof a thatch of grass. The sleeping place 

 at one end was on slightly raised ground, six inches above the 

 rest of the floor, and was divided off by a curtain of tappa 

 suspended from a cord stretched across. The floor was merely 

 the earth covered with mats. This description will suit any 

 Fijian house except as to dimensions. 



The chief sat on his mat near the middle of the house, whilst 

 four or five servants and a visitor sat at the far end. The chief's 

 small boy was being polished up by his nurse for the festivities, 

 and another woman was making girdles of jasmine twigs for 

 the chief's little daughter, holding one end of the garlands 

 between her toes, as she twined the twigs into the sennet with 

 her fingers at the other. 



When the small boy was handed from one nurse to another, 

 each nurse, after handing him, went through the usual ceremony 

 of respect to a chief, sat still a moment and clapped her hands 

 four times reverently, and did the same after handing the boy 

 to his father. The clapping was not done so as to make a noise, 

 the palms of the hands were merely brought together quietly 

 four times. The women looked reverently on the floor whilst 

 doing it, as if saying a prayer. It was not at all done as an act 

 of ostentation — indeed the women's backs might be turned to 

 the company at the time— but appeared much more like a 

 ceremony of private devotion. The posture of the hands 

 whilst clapped together is the same as that of Europeans and 

 Japanese, and so many races, during prayer. 



The chief dressed his son's head himself. The head dressing 

 consisted in shaving off all the boy's wool, except a vertical 

 ridge, which was left intact at the back, and looked somewhat 

 like the crest of a Greek helmet, and in smearing the whole of 

 the shaved part with a thick coating of a bright vermilion red. 



We drank kaava and tasted Fijian puddings, which are 



