PEOPLE WHO BATHE EVERY DAY.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2643, 21 January 1908, Page 7

PEOPLE WHO BATHE EVERY DAY.

The inhabitants of Hawaii, and, indeed, of the islands of the Pacific generally, are the most amphibious people one can well imagine. Often they have several baths in one day, and everybody bathes at least once in the twenty-four hours, and has a good scrubbing into the bargain with the best material that they have for the purpose. If possible, villages are built within convenient distance of a river, or a large pond, or lake is made by damming up a streamlet or two. In this place mixed bathing is employed by the villagers, who use for soap the large green oranges which grow about the pool. This fruit is too bitter for eating, but when the pulp is rubbed on the skin of the natives, which is always greased with cocoanut oil. it makes a real soap and lathers nicely. Scrubbing brushes are also provided by Dame Nature. A segment is torn from the husk of the cocoanut, and the fibres thus exposed serve for the purpose of the bristles of a manufactured brush. The bather makes good use of the soap and brushes thus provided, and when he has finished his ablutions he sits in the wind to dry. Bathing is a curiously solemn ceremony, and during the process if drying no one thinks of talking more than is necessary, while running about to expediate matters would be considered a great'breach of decorum. When the skin is sufficiently dry a coating of cocoanut oil is rubbed in briskly. Then the bather winds a strip of cloth, or gaudy print, round the waist in the approved native style, and the ceremony is at an end.