OCCUPATIONS. 133 
mothers, our dressmakers in London would be 
delighted with the simplicity, and yet elegant 
taste, of these untaught females. 
Their native modesty, assisted by a proper 
sense of religion and morality, instilled into 
their youthful minds by John Adams, had 
hitherto preserved these interesting people pure 
and uncorrupted. 
They all labour, while young, in the culti- 
vation of the ground ; and when possessed of a 
sufficient quantity of cleared land, and of stock 
to maintain a family, they are allowed to marry, 
but always with the consent of Adams. 
The greatest harmony prevailed in this little 
society ; their only quarrels (and these rarely 
happened) being, according to their own expres- 
sion, quarrels of the mouth. They are honest in 
their dealings, which consist of bartering different 
articles for mutual accommodation. 
Their habitations are extremely neat. The 
little village of Pitcairn forms a pretty square, 
the houses at the upper end of which are occu- 
pied by the patriarch John Adams and his 
family, consisting of his old blind wife and 
three daughters, from fifteen to eighteen years 
of age, and a boy of eleven; a daughter of his 
wife by a former husband, and a son-in-law. 
On the opposite side is the dwelling of Thursday 
October Christian, and in the centre is a smooth 
verdant lawn, on which the poultry are let loose, 
fenced in so as to prevent the intrusion of the 
domestic quadrupeds. All that was done was 
obviously undertaken on a settled plan, unlike 
anything to be met with on the other islands. 
