very pretty effect, and in a very great quantity; for I have seen five or six such pieces wound about the head of one woman:  Among these threads they stick flowers of various kinds, particularly the cape-jessamine, of which they have great plenty, as it is always planted near their houses.  The men sometimes stick the tail-feather of the Tropic-bird upright in their hair, which, as I have observed before, is often tied in a bunch upon the top of their heads:  Sometimes they wear a kind of whimsical garland, made of flowers of various kinds, stuck into a piece of the rind of a plantain; or of scarlet peas, stuck with gum upon a piece of wood:  And sometimes they wear a kind of wig, made of the hair of men or dogs, or perhaps of cocoa-nut strings, woven upon one thread, which is tied under their hair, so that these artificial honours of their head may hang down behind.  Their personal ornaments, besides flowers, are few; both sexes wear ear-rings, but they are placed only on one side:  When we came they consisted of small pieces of shell, stone, berries, red peas, or some small pearls, three in a string; but our beads very soon supplanted them all.

The children go quite naked; the girls till they are three or four years old, and the boys till they are six or seven.

The houses, or rather dwellings of these people, have been occasionally mentioned before:  They are all built in the wood, between the sea and the mountains, and no more ground is cleared for each house, than just sufficient to prevent the dropping of the branches from rotting the thatch with which they are covered; from the house, therefore, the inhabitant steps immediately under the shade, which is the most delightful that can be imagined.  It consists of groves of bread-fruit and cocoa-nuts, without underwood, which are intersected, in all directions, by the paths that lead from one house to the other.  Nothing can be more grateful than this shade in so warm a climate, nor any thing more beautiful than these walks.  As there is no underwood, the shade cools without impeding the air; and the houses, having no walls, receive the gale from whatever point it blows.  I shall now give a particular description of a house of a middling size, from which, as the structure is universally the same, a perfect idea may be formed both of those that are bigger, and those that are less.

The ground winch it covers is an oblong square, four and twenty feet long, and eleven wide; over this a roof is raised, upon three rows of pillars or posts, parallel to each other, one on each side, and the other in the middle.  This roof consists of two flat sides inclining to each other, and terminating in a ridge, exactly like the roofs of our thatched houses in England.  The utmost height within is about nine feet, and the eaves on each side reach to within about three feet and a half of the ground:  Below this, and through the whole height at each end, it is open, no part of it being enclosed with a wall.