186 MELANESIA AND ITS PEOPLE. 
to mount this platform and then drop through the tiny doorway. The 
Florida house is generally built upon piles and the floor is covered 
with split bamboos. The bed place may be raised or, as in Malaita, 
the people may sleep on the earth with no better mattress than one 
of the huge coconut leaves plaited. For the women and small children 
a platform is built to serve as a bed. Pillows as such are not much in 
use except in Santa Cruz, and a log or billet of wood makes an accept- 
able pillow for the Melanesian. 
The men and boys in the Solomons have club-houses, both in the 
villages and also down at the beach. In the club-house on the beach 
the canoes for bonito fishing are kept. Strangers are entertained in 
these club houses; the relics of the dead are kept in them and religious 
rites are performed in them. Women are excluded from the club 
houses. 
The cooking is all done at a fireplace of earth set inside a ring of 
stones on the floor. Ona stand over the fire are the household cooking 
utensils, wooden bowls, and stores of smoked almonds. Yams are kept 
on stages built in the rear part of the house and generally screened off. 
Every house has its inner chamber that serves as a bedroom if required. 
Life is lived very much in public, and privacy is a thing not understood 
or desired. ‘To be allowed to go behind the partition in any house is 
significant as a mark of close acquaintanceship. 
CLOTHING. 
Bark cloth (tapa) is made in Melanesia, but it never figured as an 
article of clothing and its main use was to form a kind of shawl in which 
the baby was slung whencarried from the shoulder. Before the coming 
of the white man clothing of any sort was very little worn by Mela- 
nesians. ‘lhe people of Santa Cruz, both men and women, were indeed 
clad sufficiently to satisfy our European notions of decency, and in 
the southern New Hebrides and in Florida and Ysabel the women 
wore petticoats made of mats or of grass, but in very many of the 
islands the women’s dress was of the scantiest, and the men wore 
nothing but a section of a leaf of a large pandanus. In the southeast 
Solomons the men commonly were quite naked and the women wore 
but a scanty fringe, while on Big Malaita not even the traditional 
fig leaf was worn. In Santa Cruz, where all women and girls are 
swathed in mats and are kept in strict seclusion, there is more immoral- 
ity, and that of a gross and shocking sort, than in the Lau-speaking 
districts of Malaita, where the women wear no clothing of any sort 
whatever. Once the mind gets over the shock experienced at the idea 
of the unclothed body, it will be obvious to the unprejudiced person 
that the absence of clothing does not necessarily imply immodesty 
either of thought or action. A Heathen woman on Malaita knows no 
shame at the fact that her body is unclothed. 
