WIDOWS' WEEDS 115 



The best dressed, or in an}' case the most dressed, 

 members of the community are the widows, who wear, 

 in addition to the other articles of female attire, what 

 can only be described as a poke bonnet. In some cases 

 the bonnet projects so far in front of the face as to 

 obscure the features, in some it is of a conical design, 

 and in others it resembles in shape nothing so much 

 as the morion of a mediaeval man-at-arms. 



Like the waistcoats worn by the women, the bonnets 

 are made of ingeniously plaited fibre, and both of 

 these look well when they are newly made, but they 

 very quickly become hideous with damp and dirt, and 

 the wearer is a person to be shunned. The small girls, 

 unlike the boys, wear a narrow strip of bark cloth 

 tucked between the legs almost as soon as they can walk. 

 It is perhaps worth mentioning that these people have 

 the art of sewing ; they make eyed needles out of 

 sharp fish bones, and with strands of fibre they contrive 

 to sew pieces of bark cloth very neatly together. 



There are no milk-producing domesticated animals 

 in the country, so the women suckle their infants for 

 a very long time, and you may occasionally see 

 children of (apparently) three or four years old at their 

 mothers' breasts ; but whether young or old, it is very 

 difficult to estimate the age of these people. In the 

 course of a year we saw Httle children grow into active 

 boys and we saw young men become middle-aged. 

 I should say — but this is pure speculation — that a man 

 is old at forty years and a woman at an even earlier 

 age ; it seems probable, too, that the life of a woman 

 is shorter than that of a man. 



