sent day.

From Tonga Miss Cumming was conveyed to Samoa, where she was very
hospitably received by the Samoan notables, and might have enjoyed
herself greatly, but for the civil war in which the group is always
plunged. It is to the credit of the inhabitants, however, that they
agree to abstain from fighting on at least one day of the week. In their
manners and customs they retain more of the primitive simplicity than is
found now-a-days in most of the Polynesian islands.

Her descriptions of Tahiti, the Eden of the Pacific, are not less
glowing than those of her predecessors, from Wallis and Bougainville
down to "the Earl and the Doctor." They are full of warm, rich colour,
as might have been expected from one who is an artist as well as an
author, and set before us such a succession of vivid and enchanting
landscapes as hardly any other portion of this wide, wide world can
parallel; for with the bold majesty of Alpine peaks is combined the
luxuriant grace of tropical forests, and valleys as beautiful as that of
Tempe open out upon a boundless ocean as blue as the sky it glasses. Add
to this that the vegetation has a charm of its own--the feathery palm
and the bread-fruit tree lending to it a quite distinctive character.
Here is a vignette, which will give the reader some notion of this
enchanting Tahitian scenery:--"We rode along the green glades, through
the usual successions of glorious foliage; groves of magnificent
bread-fruit trees, indigenous to those isles; next a clump of noble
mango-trees, recently imported, but now quite at home; then a group of
tall palms, or a long avenue of gigantic bananas, their leaves sometimes
twelve feet long, meeting over our heads. Then came patches of sugar or
Indian corn, and next a plantation of vanilla, trained to climb over
closely-planted tall coffee, or else over vermilion bushes. Sometimes it
is planted without more ado at the root of pruned guava bushes. These
grow wild over the whole country, loaded with large, excellent fruit,
and, moreover, supply the whole fuel of the isles, and good food for
cattle.... Amidst all this wealth of food-producing vegetation, I
sometimes looked in vain for any trees that were merely ornamental; and
literally there were only the yellow hibiscus, which yields a useful
fibre, and the candle-nut, covered with clusters of white blossoms,
somewhat resembling white lilac, and bearing nuts with oily kernels,
whence the tree derives its name."[45