46 THE FEMALE SEX. 



to the eastward. Men have introduced me to their wives with an air 

 of politeness which supplied an index of the social status of their 

 helpmates : and to show that the position of autliority may be re- 

 versed — although from the absence of clothing one cannot employ the 

 expressive phrase applied to those women who rule their husbands 

 in more civilized lands — I ma^^ here observe that on one occasion an 

 able-bodied man complained to me that his wife chastised him on the 

 previous night. 



I had one very pleasing exyjerience of the domestic establishment 

 of the Treasury chief. Having informed Mule that I was desirous to 

 witness the manufacture of the cooking-pots employed by the 

 natives, he despatched four of his wives into the interior of the island 

 to get the clay ; and in due time I was summoned to his house where 

 I found myself in the midst of a dozen of his wives who were 

 already hard at work, for the women are the potters here as in other 

 parts of "savagedom." Mule's wives received me with much polite- 

 n3ss, and made me sit down on a mat to watch the proceedings, 

 being evidently much pleased -with the idea of exhibiting their skill. 

 For about five minutes there was but little work done as my curios- 

 ity led me to look more closely into the different steps of the process, 

 a proceeding which caused much hilarity and elicited frequent excla- 

 mations of " tion drakono," often preceded by " Dokus," which im- 

 plied that the doctor was a very good man. At last, after I had 

 smiled on them to the best of mj'- ability, and had gained their 

 further approbation by taking on my knee a little well-scrubbed 

 urchin that could hardly toddle, who in the most matter-of-fact 

 manner made a vigorous onslaught on my chin and then went tooth- 

 and-nail at my shirt-cuff, all in the best of humour and seemingly in 

 an absent-minded kind of fashion as thouo-li its little mind was 

 already occujned by far weightier matters — after all this, the more 

 serious part of the entertainment became fairly under way. At its 

 conclusion, 1 gave the principal wife a quantity of beads and a 

 number of jews-harps to be distributed among her companions. 



.The marital establish nient of Tomimas, one of the principal Faro 

 chiefs, is small as compared with those of Gorai and Mule. He has 

 only four wives who are named respectively, Domari, Duia, Bose, and 

 Omakau, the first being the mother of the chief's eldest son, Kopana, 

 an intelligent young man about twenty-two years of age. 



In connection with the names of the women of Bougainville 

 Straits, I should observe that there was always some reluctance on 



