? ? ? ? Here I often lay for hours, covered with a gauze-like veil of tappa, while Fayaway, seated beside me, and holding in her hand a fan woven from the leaflets of a young cocoa-nut bough, brushed aside the insects that occasionally lighted on my face, and Kory-Kory, with a view of chasing away my melancholy, performed a thousand antics in the water before us.
? ? ? ? As my eye wandered along this romantic stream, it would fall upon the half-immersed figure of a beautiful girl, standing in the transparent water, and catching in a little net a species of diminutive shell-fish, of which these people are extravagantly fond. Sometimes a chattering group would be seated upon the edge of a low rock in the midst of the brook, busily engaged in thinning and polishing the shells of cocoa-nuts, by rubbing them briskly with a small stone in the water, an operation which soon converts them into a light and elegant drinking-vessel, somewhat resembling goblets made of tortoise-shell.
? ? ? ? But the tranquillizing influences of beautiful scenery, and the exhibition of human life under so novel and charming an aspect, were not my only sources of consolation.
? ? ? ? Every evening the girls of the house gathered about me on the mats, and, after chasing away Kory-Kory from my side- who, nevertheless, retired only to a little distance, and watched their proceedings with the most jealous attention- would anoint my body with a fragrant oil, squeezed from a yellow root, previously pounded between a couple of stones, and which in their language is denominated "aka.
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