_Tuesday, September 21st._--Reasonably convalescent again, but weak and not fit for much. It was a most unpleasant day however, with fitful squalls of rain and wind, and I could not have gone far even if I had wanted. The boys were busy planting “Virelumlum’s” yam garden, and were kept hard at work all day. I was not surprised, for I previously knew it to be the custom here for the chief’s wives to prepare his food in the gamal. Generally speaking, women are not admitted within these edifices, and more especially here, but to-day Virelumlum’s wives, three or four in number, were busy with the men getting ready the evening meal. I asked them where they were going to eat themselves, and they said with some naïvete, “Oh! that is a secondary matter, we have to get our masters’ dinner ready and shift for ourselves as best we may.” It would be impossible for them to eat any food cooked in the gamal, and so religiously have they been brought up under this restriction, that they would probably sooner die of hunger than attempt to appease their appetites with what to them is sacred food, or at least forbidden, and they are more faithful to the laws of men, than was Eve to the law of God. And, I suppose as spiritual death was the judgment on Eve’s disobedience, so would physical death be the penalty in case of their transgression. Human life is not more highly valued here than it is in Ireland, and a woman’s life is not much accounted of, and death is the common penalty for very trivial offences. Here it is universally averred that woman is at the root of all the evil that transpires, and poor things, they are too often the victims where the men go scott free. Here the females are much in excess of the males, and naturally polygamy is widely practised. The big men however, get the lion’s share, and it is no uncommon thing to find a troop of women in the households of the chiefs, varying from ten to fifty or even one hundred. All no doubt are not wives, but slaves and beasts of burden, and these big guns do nothing themselves but impose all the duties of the house and garden on their women. I do not think I am maligning the Opa men when I say that I look upon them as hideously lazy, but of course that results in large measure from their imposing their own natural duties on others, whom they find ready or obliged to do it for them. It is quite different at Maewo, where monogamy now mostly obtains, and where the men take an active and a man’s share in all out door employments. However Virelumlum was very active bustling about among his women, and I saw him shouldering off a big burden of yams, following up the rear of a troop of preceding females.