Wild Life in Southern Seas. 
366 
for there are flying-fish or crayfish that have 
been caught in the night to be cooked. But as 
the women tend the ovens and the men sit 
about the trader’s verandah, a trouserless native 
in a white shirt and waist-cloth of navy-blue 
print appears in the village square with a 
mallet in his hand and strikes it vigorously 
against the sides of a wooden cylinder placed 
without the white-walled church of coral stone. 
As the loud, resonant notes vibrate through the 
morning air the women leave their cooking, and 
hastening inside their houses don their print 
gowns over their girdles of grass, and take up 
their Bibles, and the men run from the trader’s 
dwelling to their own to put on shirts and hats, 
to follow their women-kind to morning service. 
For the wooden logo , or drum, is the local church 
bell, and ’twould be a dire offence for any one 
not sick to fail to be present. The trader, too, 
for propriety’s sake, grumblingly closes his 
store door until the service, which is short 
enough, is finished. Then the people, disrobing 
themselves to their girdles of grass as they file 
out of the church, return to their houses and 
sit cross-legged to their meal. 
And now the sun comes out with glowing 
