ic4 THE CORAL LANDS OF THE PACIFIC. 



procrastination has been simply reduced to a science, and the 

 word mahia, or in Queen's English , ' I'll think about that to- 

 morrow,' is incessantly in his mouth. Malua is now an Angli- 

 cised word in the group, and over and over again, when wait- 

 ing very patiently for something or other, I have sincerely 

 regretted the demoralising influence of a tropical climate which 

 has infected white men as well as natives with that do-nothing 

 system of malua. 



I forget which great foreign statesman it was who said, 

 'Never do to-day what you can put off till to-morrow.' If he 

 had ever visited Fiji, its interesting inhabitants would have 

 much improved on his well-known dictum. Their malua is, 

 in the words of Shakespeare, an eternal 'to-morrow, and to- 

 morrow, and to-morrow.' The sweetness of delay is all-in-all 

 to them, and even the most accomplished representative of 

 the ' Circumlocution Office,' in all its dilatoriness, would pale 

 into insignificance before a Levuka day-labourer making up 

 his mind whether he will accept a job or not. 



The Fijian is an inveterate haggler. I have seen a native 

 with some wretched live fowl or duck on his arm, come into 

 Levuka quite early in the morning, and demand for hours a 

 price twice as much as he knows he will ultimately get ; he 

 will haggle and haggle with you over that bird, till you send 

 him off in disgust, and then perhaps late in the afternoon he 

 will come back and take one shilling for what, at seven in the 

 morning, he valued at two shillings. He has no idea of keep- 

 ing a secret, and anything known to one 'boy 'is known to 

 his neighbours in an inconceivably short space of time. If you 

 pay him a little more than he expects he immediately tells all 

 his friends, and as likely as not shares the plunder with them. 

 He often makes presents, but expects presents in return. A 

 young man will not perhaps work well at home or near his 



