They were dressed in the regular old-time festive costume of Polynesia; for Boupari, being a small and remote island, too insignificant to be visited by European ships, retained still all its aboriginal heathen manners and customs.

The sight was, indeed, a curious and picturesque one.

The girls, large-limbed, soft-skinned, and with delicately rounded figures, sat on the ground, laughing and talking, with their knees crossed under them; their wrists were encinctured with girdles of dark-red dracaena leaves, their swelling bosoms half concealed, half accentuated by hanging necklets of flowers.
Their beautiful brown arms and shoulders were bare throughout; their long, black hair was gracefully twined and knotted with bright scarlet flowers.

The men, strong and stalwart, sat behind on short stools or lounged on the buttressed roots of the bread-fruit trees, clad like the women in narrow waist-belts of the long red dracaena leaves, with necklets of sharks' teeth, pendent chain of pearly shells, a warrior's cap on their well-shaped heads, and an armlet of native beans, arranged below the shoulder, around their powerful arms.

Altogether, it was a striking and beautiful picture.