376 BARK CLOTH. Chai\ XIX, 



knot of the net is different from ours, for they invariably use 

 what sailors call the reef knot, but they net with a needle 

 like that we use. From the amount of native cotton cloth 

 worn in many of the southern villages, it is evident that a 

 goodly number of busy hands, and patient heads, must be em- 

 ployed in the cultivation of cotton and in the various slow pro- 

 cesses through which it has to pass, before the web is finished 

 in the native loom. In addition to tins branch of industry, an 

 extensive manufacture of cloth, from the inner bark of an un- 

 described tree, of the botanical group, Ccesalpinece, is ever 

 going on, from one end of the lake to the other ; and both 

 toil and time are required to procure the bark, and to prepare 

 it by pounding and steeping it to render it soft and pliable. 

 The prodigious amount of the bark clothing worn indicates 

 the destruction of an immense number of trees every year; 

 yet the adjacent heights seem still well covered Avith timber. 



The Lake people are by no means handsome : the women — 

 to use our mildest term to the fair sex — are very plain ; and 

 really make themselves hideous by the means they adopt to 

 render their persons beautiful and attractive. The pelele, or 

 ornament for the upper lip, is universally worn by the ladies ; 

 the most valuable is of pure tin, hammered into the shape of 

 a small dish ; some are made of white quartz, and give the 

 wearer the appearance of having an inch or more of one of 

 Price's patent candles thrust through the lip, and projecting 

 beyond the tip of the nose. Some ladies, not content with the 

 upper pelele, go to extremes, as ladies will, and insert another 

 in the under lip through a hole almost opposite the lower 

 gums. A few peleles are made of a blood-red kind of 

 pipeclay, much in fashion, — " sweet things " in the way of 

 lip-rings ; but so hideous to behold, that no time nor usage 

 could make our eyes rest upon them without aversion. 



All the natives are tattooed from head to foot, the figures 



