Note 42 — OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (continued 4)

“Kava, properly Ava, is a drink more or less intoxicating, made from the root of the Piper Methysticum, a Pepper plant. The root is grated: formerly it was chewed by fair damsels. The root thus broken up is rubbed about in a great pail, with water slowly added. A strainer of bark cloth is plunged into it at times, and wrung out so as to carry away the small fragments of root. The drink is made and used in ceremony. Every detail is regulated by rules, and the manner of the mixture of the water, the straining, the handling of the cup, the drinking out of it and returning, should all be done according to a well-established manner and in certain cadences.” I borrow this explanation from the late Mr. Lafarge’s notes to his catalogue of South Sea Drawings. It may serve to make clearer several passages in later letters of the present collection. Readers of the late Lord Pembroke’s South Sea Bubbles will remember the account of this beverage and its preparation in Chap. viii. of that volume.