is too small for the poets and musicians; a death, a visit, the day's
news, the day's pleasantry, will be set to rhyme and harmony. Even half-
grown girls, the occasion arising, fashion words and train choruses of
children for its celebration. Song, as with all Pacific islanders, goes
hand in hand with the dance, and both shade into the drama. Some of the
performances are indecent and ugly, some only dull; others are pretty,
funny, and attractive. Games are popular. Cricket-matches, where a
hundred played upon a side, endured at times for weeks, and ate up the
country like the presence of an army. Fishing, the daily bath,
flirtation; courtship, which is gone upon by proxy; conversation, which
is largely political; and the delights of public oratory, fill in the
long hours.

But the special delight of the Samoan is the _malanga_. When people form
a party and go from village to village, junketing and gossiping, they are
said to go on a _malanga_. Their songs have announced their approach ere
they arrive; the guest-house is prepared for their reception; the virgins
of the village attend to prepare the kava bowl and entertain them with
the dance; time flies in the enjoyment of every pleasure which an
islander conceives; and when the _malanga_ sets forth, the same welcome
and the same joys expect them beyond the next cape, where the nearest
village nestles in its grove of palms. To the visitors it is all golden;
for the hosts, it has another side. In one or two words of the language
the fact peeps slyly out. The same word (_afemoeina_) expresses "a long
call" and "to come as a calamity"; the same word (_lesolosolou_)
signifies "to have no intermission of pain" and "to have no cessation, as
in the arrival of visitors"; and _soua_, used of epidemics, bears the
sense of being overcome as with "fire, flood, or visitors." But the gem
of the dictionary is the verb _alovao_, which illustrates its pages like
a humorous woodcut. It is used in the sense of "to avoid visitors," but