The women were plain, and made themselves more so by painting their faces with red ochre and oil, which being generally fresh and wet upon their cheeks and foreheads, was easily transferred to the noses of those who thought fit to salute them; and that they were not wholly averse to such familiarity, the noses of several of our people strongly testified:  They were, however, as great coquets as any of the most fashionable ladies in Europe, and the young ones as skittish as an unbroken filly:  Each of them wore a petticoat, under which there was a girdle, made of the blades of grass highly perfumed, and to the girdle was fastened a small bunch of the leaves of some fragrant plant, which served their modesty as its innermost veil.[55] The faces of the men were not so generally painted, yet we saw one whose whole body, and even his garments, were rubbed over with dry ochre, of which he kept a piece constantly in his hand, and was every minute renewing the decoration in one part or another, where he supposed it was become deficient.[56] In personal delicacy they were not equal to our friends at Otaheite, for the coldness of the climate did not invite them so often to bathe; but we saw among them one instance of cleanliness in which they exceeded them, and of which perhaps there is no example in any other Indian nation.  Every house, or every little cluster of three or four houses, was furnished with a privy, so that the ground was every where clean.  The offals of their food, and other litter, were also piled up in regular dunghills, which probably they made use of at a proper time for manure.

[Footnote 55:  It is elsewhere said of these women, that, contrary to the custom of the sex in general, they affected dress rather less than the men.  As to their modesty, let one fact related in the same place, be allowed its legal influence.—­Their innermost veil, as our author will have it, was always bound fast round them, except when they went into the water to catch lobsters, and then great care was taken that they should not be seen by the other sex.  “Some of us happening one day to land upon a small island in Tolaga Bay, we surprised several of them at this employment; and the chaste Diana, with her nymphs, could not have discovered more confusion and distress at the sight of Actaeon, than these women expressed on our approach.  Some of them hid themselves among the rocks, and the rest crouched down in the sea till they had made themselves a girdle and apron of such weeds as they could find, and when they came out, even with this veil, we could perceive that their modesty suffered much pain by our presence!” One fact of this kind speaks volumes.  The reader may glance over them at his leisure.—­E.]

[Footnote 56:  It is elsewhere remarked, that the bodies of both sexes are marked with the black stains called Amoco, like the tattowing of the Otaheitans, but that the women are not so lavish in the decoration as the men, and that whereas at Otaheite the breech is the choice spot for the display of their beautifying ingenuity, in New Zealand, on the contrary, it is almost entirely neglected as unworthy of embellishment.  So much for the capricious partiality of dame Fashion.—­E.]