LIFE OF JAMES DWIGHT DANA 



account of the extent of the roof, are only four or five 

 feet high, and the people have to stoop to go in and out. 

 The weather is so warm that these sides are left open, or 

 are closed only with mats on the side exposed to the 

 winds. 



' These houses or huts are nothing but open sheds a 

 single room without chairs or tables, without a stool or 

 a bed. The floor, which is nothing but the bare ground, 

 is covered with mats upon which the men, women, and 

 children are sitting or lying down. Fishing-poles and 

 nets, and rolls of large mats or bundles of native cloth, 

 lie across the beams overhead ; and a few cocoanut shells, 

 used as drinking-cups or water-vessels, hang up against 

 these beams, with a calabash or two of water, and per- 

 haps a bundle of cooked food tied up in leaves. This is 

 in general the house furniture of the savages throughout 

 the Pacific islands. Their huts are usually kept clean, 

 and when a guest arrives, instead of offering a chair, as 

 with us, a mat is spread out for him to sit down on. A 

 mat or large leaf, laid on the floor, forms their table-cloth 

 and table, and their fingers serve for knife and fork. The 

 common apartment just described is also their common 

 bedroom at night. They lie down like cattle together, a 

 pillow consisting of a stick like a broom-handle supported 

 at each end on short legs, and a cover of native cloth. 



" No books, not a scrap of writing, is to be seen about 

 their huts. In schooling they are behind the very small- 

 est of you, my children, for they do not know their A, 

 B, C's. Indeed, they have no alphabet, and the thought 

 never occurred to them of spelling words with letters and 

 writing them down. At one of the Navigator Islands, 

 when first visited by missionaries, a missionary wished to 

 send for a hatchet to a white man that was building a 

 house a short distance off; and after writing on a chip, 

 as he had no paper at hand, he gave the chip to a native, 

 telling him that if he would take it to the white man, 

 pointing yonder to the carpenter, he would give him the 

 hatchet. The native looked up into his face to see if he 

 was in earnest ; for he thought the missionary was trifling 

 with him in sending him off with a chip. After some 

 hesitation, he at last trots off to the place, and, doubting 

 still, yet with a look of curiosity, he cautiously offers the 

 chip to the carpenter. The native expected to see him 



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