The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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The girls wear pretty print
frocks, made in the English style, and several of them wore the
hibiscus in their shining hair.
Some of the older girls were
beautiful in face as well as graceful in figure, but there was a
snaky undulation about their movements which I never saw among
Europeans. All looked bubbling over with fun and frolic, and there
was a refinement and intelligence about their expression which
contrasted favourably with that of the ordinary female face on the
islands.
There are two dormitories, excellently ventilated, with a four-post
bed, with mosquito-bars, for each girl, and the beds were covered
with those brilliant-coloured quilts in which the natives delight,
and in which they exercise considerable ingenuity as well as
individuality of taste. One Sister sleeps in each dormitory, and
these highly-educated and refined women have no place of retirement
except a very plain oratory; and having taken the vow of poverty,
they have of course no possessions, none of the books, pictures, and
knick-knacks wherewith others adorn their surroundings. Their whole
lives, with the exception of the time passed in the oratory, are
spent with the girls, and in visiting the afflicted at their homes,
and this through eight blazing years, with the mercury always at 80
degrees!
The Hawaiian women have no notions of virtue as we understand it,
and if there is to be any future for this race it must come through
a higher morality.
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