ity. Let our children be blessed and multiplied.
Remove far from us fines and sicknesses. Regard our poverty; and
send us food to eat, and cloth to keep us warm. Drive away from us
sailing gods, lest they come and cause disease and death. Protect
this family by your presence, and may health and long life be given
to us all."

It is related of an old chief in Savaii, that one night at the evening
meal he ordered a sea-crab to be reserved for his breakfast. In the
night some lads of the family got up and ate it. Next morning the old
man was in a great rage, rose, and said to his daughter that he was
going off to commit suicide, he could bear no longer the unkindness of
the family. He seized his staff and went off to the mountain, where
there is a deep ravine. When he reached the edge of the precipice he
called to his daughter, who had followed him, that he would jump over,
and cause a storm to arise and destroy the place--and over he went.
The daughter thought it was of no use to go home, and so she lay down
on the edge of the ravine, and became a mountain to shut up the storm
and save the people from the threatened wrath of her father.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Gods supposed to come in Tongan canoes and foreign
vessels.]

[Footnote 2: The principal god of the family.]

CHAPTER IX.

CLOTHING.

In our last chapter we alluded to the food of the Samoans, and now
proceed to a description of their clothing, the materials of which it
is made, their modes of ornament, etc.

During the day a covering of _ti_ leaves _(Dracaena terminalis_) was
all that either sex thought necessary. "They sewed" _ti_ "leaves
together, and made themselves aprons." The men had a small one about a
foot square, the women had theirs made of longer _ti_ leaves, reaching
from the waist down below the knee, and made wide, so as to form a
girdle covering all round. They had no regular covering for any other
part of the body. Occasionally, during rain, they would tie a banana
leaf round the head for a cap, or hold one over them as an umbrella.
They made shades for the eyes of a little piece of plaited cocoa-nut
leaflet; and sometimes they made sandals of the plaited bark of the
_Hibiscus tiliaceus_, to protect the feet while fishing among the
prickly coral about the reef.

_Native Cloth._--At night they slept on a mat, using as a covering a
mat or a sheet of native cloth, and inclosed all round by a curtain of
th