some young chief with whom he might unite. On these occasions, six or
a dozen young men would be tattooed at one time; and for these there
might be four or five tattooers employed.

Tattooing is still kept up to some extent, and is a regular
profession, just as house-building, and well paid. The custom is
traced to Taēmā and Tilafainga (see p. 55); and they were worshipped
by the tattooers as the presiding deities of their craft.

The instrument used in the operation is an oblong piece of human bone
(_os ilium_), about an inch and a half broad and two inches long. A
time of war and slaughter was a harvest for the tattooers to get a
supply of instruments. The one end is cut like a small-toothed comb,
and the other is fastened to a piece of cane, and looks like a little
serrated adze. They dip it into a mixture of candle-nut ashes and
water, and, tapping it with a little mallet, it sinks into the skin;
and in this way they puncture the whole surface over which the
tattooing extends. The greater part of the body from the waist down to
the knee is covered with it, variegated here and there with neat
regular stripes of the untattooed skin, which when they are well
oiled, make them appear in the distance as if they had on black silk
knee-breeches. Behrens, in describing these natives in his narrative
of Roggewein's voyage of 1772, says: "They were clothed from the waist
downwards with fringes and a kind of silken stuff artificially
wrought." A nearer inspection would have shown that the "fringes"
were a bunch of red _ti_ leaves (_Dracæna terminalis_) glistening with
cocoa-nut oil, and the "kind of silken stuff," the tattooing just
described. As it extends over such a large surface the operation is a
tedious and painful affair. After smarting and bleeding for a while
under the hands of the tattooers, the patience of the youth is