A child being tattooed.
p. [140].
She fulfils with incomparable zeal the functions confided to her by Nature, but as she has, at the same time, to attend to the heavy duties allotted her by man she becomes over-worked and worn-out with excessive fatigue.
When thirty years old she looks almost as old and withered as one of our hard-worked countrywomen does at fifty, and the poor creature cannot in any way conceal this premature falling off because of—the extreme lightness of her attire.
"The tailor tree of our great father Adam" has no leaves for the inhabitants of the jungle, for both male and female only wear a strip of bark (well beaten to render it flexible) wound round the body and fastened on the hips.
That worn by the men never exceeds four inches in breadth, but the women use lists of from six to eight inches wide. Another piece of bark-cloth is passed between the legs and tied, in front and behind, to this belt.
The women, although daughters of the forest, are not without a certain amount of coquetry and will often decorate their girdles with flowers or medicinal and sweet-smelling herbs, but they never think of making a chaste veil of large leaves with which to cover those parts of their persons that ought to be kept secret from the public gaze.
The costume that they are wearing in the photographs was prepared by me in order to present these ochre-coloured Eves to my readers in a more decent state, or rather, a little more in accordance with what civilized society requires, because "to the pure all things are pure" and in my opinion the perfect innocence in which these women go about naked is preferable to that consciousness of their natural form which leads so many of our society ladies and other females, to resort to artificial means that they may deceive their admirers, and gain a name for beauty.
The men, too, are even to be envied, for in the total absence of nether-garments their better-halves can never claim "to wear the trousers" as sometimes happens amongst us.