Native names are sometimes exceedingly funny to the perverted white mind, although to the owners they may be dignified, poetic, and even beautiful. One young coffee-coloured lady of my acquaintance had been named (in Raratongan) “Cup-of-Tea.” Another was “Box-with-a-Hole-in-It”--another “Tin-of-Meat.” I should suppose, from my knowledge of their religious training, that each of these ladies possessed a godly scripture name of her own, properly bestowed on her at her proper baptism. But in the Cook Islands, the name a native is christened by, and the name he or she goes by, are almost always distinct, which is certainly confusing. Worse confusion still is caused by the odd habit of changing these commonly accepted names on any great occasion that seems to need special commemoration. The natives themselves never seem to become puzzled over all these name-changes, but so much can hardly be said of the whites. It is, at the least, perplexing to employ a gardener called Zebedee by the missionaries, Thunderstorm by his friends, and Tin Roof by his relatives--like the notable character in _The Hunting of the Snark_,
Whose intimate friends called him Candle-Ends,
But it is even worse to be informed--some day, when you go to look after Zebedee-Thunderstorm-Tin Roof down in the village, and ask why he has not turned up to weed your pineapples--that his name isn’t any of the three, but “Barbed Wire,” because he has just finished putting up a fence of barbed wire round the grave of his boy who died last year, and has resolved to call himself henceforth, “Barbed Wire,” in memory of his son!
Native notions about European clothes often provide a feast of fun for the whites, who set the copies in dress.
When a lace-trimmed garment of mine, usually reserved for private wear under the shades of night and the shelter of a quilt and sheet, went to Sunday morning church as a best dress in full daylight, on the person of the laundress who had been entrusted with my clothes for the wash, the funny side of the affair was so much the more conspicuous, that the borrower never got the reproof she certainly ought to have had. And when a certain flower toque, made of poppies (a blossom unknown to the Pacific) first drove the women of the island half-distracted with excitement, and then led to thirty-six native ladies appearing simultaneously at a dance in Makea’s grounds, wearing most excellent copies of my Paris model, done in double scarlet hibiscus from the bush, the natural outrage to my feelings (which every woman who has ever owned a “model” will understand) was quite swallowed up in the intense amusement that the incident caused to everybody on the grounds.