r mark, he timing the incident exactly by
his watch. Daniel Dunglas Home, the famous Scottish spiritist, was
certified by Sir William Crookes and Andrew Lang to handle red-hot
coals in his hands, and could convey to others the same immunity. Lang
tells of a friend of his, a clergyman, whose hand was badly blistered
by a coal Home put in his palm, Home attributing the accident to the
churchman's unbelieving state of mind. Crookes, the distinguished
physicist, took into his laboratory handkerchiefs in which Home had
wrapped live coals, and found them "unburned, unscorched, and not
prepared to resist fire."

The scene of the Umuti was an hour's walk up the glen of Aataroa,
which began at our swimming-place. On Thursday Choti, T'yonni, and
I accompanied Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations
for the sorcery were beginning. We went through a continuous forest
of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing coppice, in which all
the riches of the Tahitian earth were mingled with growths from
abroad. Oranges and lemons, which had sprung decades before from
seeds strewn carelessly, had become giant trees of their kinds; and
the lianas and parasites, guava, lantana, and a hundred species of
ferns and orchids, with myriad mosses, covered every foot of soil,
or stretched upon the trunks and limbs, so that exquisite tapestries
garlanded the trees and hung like green and gold draperies between
them. Mape-trees prevailed, immense, weirdly shaped, often appalling
in their curious buttresses, their limbs writhing as if in torture,
suggestive of the old fetishism that had endowed them with spirits
which suffered and spoke. Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was
a bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we followed,
wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriving with my mind deeply
impressed by the esoteric suggestiveness of the scene.

On a level spot, under five ponderous mape-trees, eight or ten men
of Tautira and of Pueu and Afaahiti were completing the oven. They
had dug a pit twenty-five feet long, eighteen wide, and five deep,
with straight sides. It had been done with exactitude at the direction
of the tahua, who was staying alone in a hut near by. The earth from
the pit formed a rampart about it, but was leveled to not more than a
foot's height. At the bottom of the umu had been laid fagots of purau-
and guava-wood, and on them huge trunks of the tropical chestnut,
the mape. On the trunks were laid bas