Page:Savage Island.djvu/28

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14
THE ISLAND AND ITS PEOPLE

cow. I do not say which I think is the better system; I only contrast the two.

In the afternoon we were taken to see the cave of the Tongans. Public curiosity having now subsided, the village had resumed its normal appearance. It is cleaner and tidier even than it looked from the sea. The grass that stretches like a lawn to the cliff's edge, laced with the delicate shadow of the palm leaves, is bounded on the landward side by a stiff row of cottages, all built as exactly to plan as if a surveyor to a county council had had a hand in it, with lime-washed walls so dazzling that the eye lifts instinctively to the cool brown thatch to find rest. Every doorway is closed with a rough-hewn door; every window with broad, unpainted slats pivoted on the centre, so as to form a kind of fixed Venetian blind that admits the air and excludes the sun and rain—a device learned, it seems, from the Samoan teachers, who must in their turn have adapted it from the Venetian blinds of some European house in their own islands. These cottages are divided into rooms by thin partitions of wood or reeds that reach to the eaves, leaving the roof space open. Most of them are floored with palm-leaf matting, and a few boxes and wooden pillows are the only furni-