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On the fifteenth of August, 1790, our daughter Helen was born. The child was given Tehani’s name and long title, which in truth I cannot recollect, but I gave her my mother’s name as well. She was a lovely little creature, with strange and beautiful eyes, dark blue as the sea, and since she was our first-born, or matahìapo, her birth was the occasion for ceremonies religious and political.

A large enclosure had been fenced on the sacred ground behind Vehiatua’s family temple, and three small houses built within. The first was called “The House of Sweet Fern,” in which the mother was to be delivered of her child; the second was known as “The House of the Weak,” where mother and child would pass a fortnight afterwards; the third was called “The Common House” and had been built to shelter Tehani’s attendants. For six days after our little Helen was born, silence reigned on sea and land along the coast of Tiarapu; all of the commoners retiring into the mountain fastnesses, where they might converse, build fires for their cooking, and live in comfort till the restriction was over.