A fashionable young Wintun woman, says Mr. Powers, wears a girdle of deer-skin, the lower edge of which is slit into a long fringe with a polished pine-nut at the end of each strand, while the upper border and other portions are studded with brilliant bits of shell.[1146] The Botocudos use a covering which has little resemblance to a garment; and their neighbours, the Patachos and Machacaris, make this trifle still smaller, a thread being sufficient clothing, according to their notion of modesty.[1147] When a Carib girl attained the age of ten or twelve years, she assumed around the waist “a piece of cotton cloth worked and embroidered with minute grains of shells of different colours, decorated in the lower part with fringe.”[1148] Similar ornamental skirts are in use among the Macusís, Arawaks, and other South American peoples.[1149] Among the Guaycurûs, the men had no covering, except a narrow bandage round the loins, which was of coloured cotton, and often adorned with glass beads.[1150] The Australians of Port Essington occasionally wear girdles of finely twisted human hair, and the men sometimes add a tassel of the hair of the opossum or flying squirrel, suspended in front.[1151] The women on the Lower Murray manufacture round mats of grass or reeds, which they fasten upon their backs, “tying them in front, so that they almost resemble the shell of a tortoise.”[1152] In Tahiti, a “maro,” composed of red and yellow feathers, was considered a present of very great value, and the women thought it “most ornamental” to enfold their loins with many windings of cloth.[1153] Dr. Seemann states that, in Fiji, the girls “wore nothing save a girdle of hibiscus-fibres, about six inches wide, dyed black, red, yellow, white, or brown, and put on in such a coquettish way, that one thought it must come off every moment.”[1154] A similar practice is common in the islands of the Pacific, fringes made of cocoa-nut fibre or of leaves slit into narrow strips or filaments of bark, frequently dyed with gaudy colours, being, in most of these islands, the only garment of the natives. This costume, with its conspicuous tint and mobile fringe, has a most graceful appearance and a very pretty effect, but is far from being in harmony with our ideas of modesty. In the island of Yap, according to Cheyne, “the dress of the males, if such it may be called, is slovenly in the extreme. They wear the ‘maro’ next them, and, by way of improvement, a bunch of bark fibres dyed red, over it.”[1155] In New Caledonia, in Forster’s time, the natives only tied “a string round the middle and another round the neck;”[1156] whilst, in some other groups, the costume of the men consisted of nothing but a leaf,[1157] a mussel,[1158] or a shell.[1159]