LIFE HISTORY OF A SAVAGE. 779 
and areca nuts, and a gourd or bamboo box containing lime to 
eat with the areca or betel nut. It might all be summed up as 
follows: a man and woman, a house, a fire, a board or leaf to 
sleep on, a few baskets of food anda few weapons. Outside these 
clusters of houses, however, would be seen evidences of taste and 
appreciation of the beautiful in the planting of draccenas, crotons, 
and coleus plants of the brightest colours. 
In such a place and amid such conditions the man of whose 
life I am to give a brief outline was born, and in order to make 
my account more definite and clear than it would be if I dealt 
with him simply as an imaginary being, I shall take the liberty of 
naming him at once by the name which he will bear through life 
so far as this account is concerned, though in doing so I am doing 
what his own father and mother would not have done themselves, 
as aman is rarely if ever known by the same name from child- 
hood to old age. I shall call him Tepang, which literally means 
“my friend.” 
HIS BIRTH AND BOYHOOD. 
At his birth the father would have to clear out, but so far as I 
know, there would be no particular ceremonies observed except 
paying the women who came to nurse the mother. He would 
get first a little of the expressed juice of the cocoanut to drink, 
and would be clothed only in a warm banana leaf, and probably 
carried for a day or so on the sheath of the cocoanut b’o som. 
They make no fine mats, and only small and very coarse pieces of 
native cloth from the bark of the breadfruit where Tepang was 
born, and so his dress was simply the sunshine in the beginning 
and a certain quantity of ashes and dirt when he began to crawl 
about. 
As a boy he lived and acted much as other boys do in more 
civilized communities. The games in which he and his comrades 
played are many of them very like our own, together with some 
others peculiar to them. He and his playmates often built houses 
on the beach or away out in the shallow waters of the lagoon, and 
got more pleasure from living and sleeping there than they did in 
their own homes. Then there were often sham fights in which 
reed spears were used in place of the more dangerous ones used by 
the grown up men, and in these fights they acquired a skill in 
throwing which was very useful to them in after life. In the 
day there were fishing, boating, and bathing parties, and at night 
there were songs and dancing, amd in many other respects they 
aped the doings of their seniors. 'Tepang would work only when 
it pleased him to do so. If his father or mother told him to go 
to the garden and he did not wish to do so, he simply ran away 
to the beach or to the bush and came home when he pleased. 
He got his share of the regular evening meal, but the most of his 
