The isolation enforced by the Fijians appears to correspond with the practice of the Hebrews and Philistines, who drove the pauper lepers without the city gate, but let the high-born leper alone. Ratu Joseva, Thakombau's son, like Naaman, still maintained a household of retainers. The lot of the isolated leper in Fiji is not a very hard one while he has strength to move about. A hut is built for him in the bush; firewood is abundant; wild yams are to be had for the digging, wild fowls and pigs for the trapping; he can pick the best land for his plantation. But when the poor wretch loses the use of his legs an awful fate may await him. A horrible story is told of a leper on the Tailevu coast who had lost all sensation in his feet. Waking by his fire one morning he noticed a smell of roasting flesh, and wondered for some moments whence it came, until, when he moved himself to look out of the doorway, he noticed that the logs in the fire-place stirred, and saw that his own feet had been lying in the fire, and were burned to cinders. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 95: The greater part of this chapter is drawn from an able paper contributed to the _Folklore Journal_, 1895, by Dr. Bolton G. Corney, Chief Medical Officer of Fiji, who has made a special study of the subject.] [Footnote 96: White.] [Footnote 97: Manson, _Tropical Diseases_.] [Footnote 98: _Voyage aux iles du Grand Ocean_, par. J. A. Moerenhout. (Vol. ii, p. 156.) Paris, 1837.] CHAPTER XVIII YAWS (_Thoko_) While the decay of custom has been hastened by the introduction of new diseases, it has not been accompanied by any attempt to eradicate the old. Chief among indigenous diseases (if diseases introduced before contact with foreigners may be called indigenous) is yaws, called by the Fijians _thoko_, or by its Malayo-Polynesian name--_tona_, and by various dialectic modifications of that word, which is also used in Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, and many other Polynesian islands. The disease is but little known to the medical profession in Europe, either in practice or in medical literature. Its medical designation is _Framboesia_, so called from the strawberry-like eruptions that accompany it. By the French it is called "Le Pian." In Great Britain it is now extinct, but in the Hebrides and in the south-west counties of Scotland it was met with under the name of "sibbens," or "sivvens," as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. [Pageheader: THE SYMPTOMS]