The man whose house is being built provides the carpenters with board and lodging, and is also at hand with his neighbours to help in bringing wood from the bush, scaffolding, and other heavy work.  As we have just remarked, a Samoan house-builder made no definite charge, but left the price of his work to the judgment, generosity, and means of the person who employed him.  It was a lasting disgrace to any one to have it said that he paid his carpenter shabbily.  It branded him as a person of no rank or respectability, and was disreputable, not merely to himself, but to the whole family or clan with which he was connected.  The entire tribe or clan was his bank.  Being connected with that particular tribe, either by birth or marriage, gave him a latent interest in all their property, and entitled him to go freely to any of his friends to ask for help in paying his house-builder.  He would get a mat from one, worth twenty shillings; from another he might get one more valuable still; from another some native cloth, worth five shillings; from another, some foreign property; and thus he might collect, with but little trouble, two or three hundred useful articles, worth, perhaps, forty or fifty pounds; and in this way the carpenter was generally well paid.  Now and then there might be a stingy exception; but the carpenter, from certain indications, generally saw ahead, and decamped, with all his party, leaving the house unfinished.  It was a standing custom, that after the sides and one end of the house were finished, the principal part of the payment was made; and it was at this time that a carpenter, if he was dissatisfied, would get up and walk off.  A house with two sides and but one end, and the carpenters away, was indicative.  Nor could the chief to whom the house belonged employ another party to finish it.  It was a fixed rule of the trade, and rigidly adhered to, that no one would take up the work which another party had thrown down.  The chief, therefore, had no alternative but to go and make up matters with the original carpenter, in order to have his house decently completed.  When a house was finished, and all ready for occupation, they had their “house-warming,” or, as they called it, its oven consecration; and formerly it was the custom to add on to that a night dance, for the purpose, they said, of “treading down the beetles.”

The system of a common interest in each other’s property, to which we have referred, is still clung to by the Samoans with great tenacity.  They feel its advantages when they wish to raise a little.  Not only a house, but also a canoe, a boat, a fine, a dowry, and everything else requiring an extra effort, is got up in the same way.  They consider themselves at liberty to go and take up their abode anywhere among their friends, and remain without charge, as long as they please.  And the same custom entitles them to beg and borrow from each other to any extent.  Boats, tools, garments, money, etc., are all freely