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America's Happy Isles 209
they have eaten everything good on hand and then move on to another victim. We contented ourselves with one visit. We went to see the chief of Aua village, at the foot of Rainmaker.
At the edge of the palm grove on the beach, the chief, with twenty under-chief s behind him, came to meet us. He was a big man, heavy-jowled and three-stomached, with a headdress of horsehair. He wore with dignity a naval officer's old white coat and a white lava-lava. We shook hands gravely with him and then with his under-chiefs, and they escorted us to the village, where some three hundred natives were waiting to meet us. As we walked along, one of the officers whispered to me that the chief had been opposed to the government the year before, but now that Captain Evans had put another chief to breaking rocks along the roads, he had thought better of his attitude. At any rate, he gave us a royal reception.
It began as usual with the kava ceremony, for which we all sat cross-legged on the edge of a clearing in front of the chief's house. Six men dragged on a kava root as big as a young oak tree. At the kava-drinking the commanders and lieutenant commanders were served before Mrs. Evans, though she was served before the lower-grade officers. The natives are as stiff on precedence as the royalty of a small German principality. After the kava ceremony came innumerable speeches. Then drums began to beat, and tw^o girls came running and jumping before us, followed by the people in line, bearing gifts — rugs, grass mats, tapa cloth, chickens,