FIJI-NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITION 99 
are presided over by a competent looking white woman assisted by 
one or two Fijian men. The children went through their various 
stunts for our benefit and with a good deal of enthusiasm. They 
looked well nourished and happy. We saw the gardens where a 
sufficient amount of taro, bananas, yams, tapioca, ete. is raised to 
supply the wants of the entire community of five hundred people. 
We had a fine lunch with Rev. Le Lean and his wife and enjoyed 
a rest on their veranda. It rained almost continuously in the 
afternoon, but we saw some of the work-shops where the natives 
are taught wood work and some metal work by a competent Eng- 
lish mechanic; they make chairs, tables, bedsteads, ete. for the 
other missions, under Government contract. I was told that a 
superintendent of agriculture and stock-raising was coming from 
the Philippines and that American agricultural methods were to 
be introduced. 
The Methodist and Catholic Missions, when up to a certain 
standard grade, are financially helped by the Colonial Government 
and seem to be doing a large part of the educational work in 
Fiji. The students are taught to contribute financial aid to the 
Mission whenever possible, and I was told that the Fiji men of 
the Mission, together with their native teachers, had recently been 
working on the Government roads for three weeks, earning two 
shillings a day, nearly all of which was turned over to help the 
cause of the missions. Whenever I hear returning travelers en- 
gage in the popular pastime of ‘‘knocking the missionaries’’ I 
think of the splendid work of Dr. and Mrs. Le Lean and enter a 
prompt, emphatic protest. Having read Mr. Frederick O’Brien’s 
‘‘White Shadows in the South Seas’’ together with his comments 
on the missionaries, I asked Mrs. Le Lean whether it was true 
that the natives had suffered severely on account of being com- 
pelled to wear clothing prescribed by the missionaries. She replied 
that they, the missionaries, had done nothing in the way of in- 
sisting upon clothing, except demanding that the most primitive 
demands of decency be observed and that the clothes they wore 
be entirely sanitary and sensible. And this appeared, from my 
observation, to be absolutely true. 
Seeretary Fell invited me to dine with him at the Grand Pacific 
Hotel, where both men and women appeared in formal evening 
dress. Somehow this does not accord with our preconceived ideas 
of Fiji, but it seems that the formal dress of the European has 
now encireled the globe and no place, however remote, is secure 
