llow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats
of honour for eminent persons; and where, on the upper platform, a
single joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights
richly carved. In the old days the high place was sedulously tended. No
tree except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach upon its grades,
no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones were smoothly set,
and I am told they were kept bright with oil. On all sides the guardians
lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to watch and cleanse it. No other
foot of man was suffered to draw near; only the priest, in the days of
his running, came there to sleep--perhaps to dream of his ungodly
errand; but in the time of the feast, the clan trooped to the high place
in a body, and each had his appointed seat. There were places for the
chiefs, the drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests. The
drums--perhaps twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet
high--continuously throbbed in time. In time the singers kept up their
long-drawn, lugubrious, ululating song; in time, too, the dancers,
tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and
gesticulated--their plumed fingers fluttering in the air like
butterflies. The sense of time, in all these ocean races, is extremely
perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that almost every sound and
movement fell in one. So much the more unanimously must have grown the
agitation of the feasters; so much the more wild must have been the
scene to any European who could have beheld them there, in the strong
sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed with saffron to throw in
a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo; the women bleached by
days of confinement to a complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned
with silver plumes of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair
of dead women. All manner of island food was meanwhile spread for the
women and the commons; and, for those who were privileged to eat of it,
there were carried up to the dead-house the baskets of long-pig. It is
told that the feasts were long kept up; the people came from them
brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs heavy with their
beastly food. There are certain sentiments which we call emphatically
human--denying the honour of that name to those who lack them. In such
feasts--particularly where the victim had been slain at home, and men
banqueting on the poor clay of a comrade with who