But oh, above all, the miseries every housekeeper must daily endure in wrestling with a household of utter savages, even supposing her to be fortunate enough to get a good well-meaning set! Hitherto my ideas of native servants have been derived from the faultless cooks and other excellent attendants of India, quick, wide-awake, and neat-handed; whereas here you probably begin by having one or two Fijians, who look very intelligent, but prove hopelessly stupid, or rather utterly careless about learning our strange new ways. Day after day you must show them exactly how everything is to be done, and may be certain that each time it will be done wrong, and that the moment your back is turned they will proceed to twist up a bit of tobacco in a banana-leaf, and deliberately smoke their cigarette before touching the work you have given them. Probably they will follow you to ask where the matches are, and the only answer to any remonstrance is “_malua_” (by-and-by), a universal principle which is the bane of Fijian life. They are very honest, though sometimes they cannot resist borrowing large English bath-towels, which make most tempting _sulus_ (_i.e._, kilt); and nice cambric handkerchiefs are a tempting covering for carefully-dressed hair. It would be quite right and proper that they should use things belonging to their own chiefs, so we need not wonder that they cannot always discriminate. But the would-be housekeeper certainly needs boundless patience and unfailing gentleness. Any other course would make a Fijian altogether give up the attempt to learn anything. Most people seem to prefer engaging servants from among the “foreign labour”—_i.e._, men who have been brought from other groups on a three years’ engagement to work. Most of these are truly hideous, but they are generally more diligent, and more anxious to learn their work, than the Fijians, who, as a rule, seem to be chiefly taken up with the contemplation of their own beauty: certainly many of them are unusually fine men, with strong muscular frame and good features, set off by a splendid head of frizzy hair—not so big as the gigantic mop they wore in heathen times, but still very large and carefully dressed. Some have really silky hair.