bad results." Something wrong? "What is
it?" he asked, with an emotion that surprised me. "If you care to go
along there any evening about nine o'clock you can see for yourself,"
said I. He stepped backward. "A ghost!" he cried.

In short, in the whole field of the South Seas, there is not one to
blame another. Half blood and whole, pious and debauched, intelligent
and dull, all men believe in ghosts, all men combine with their recent
Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the old island deities.
So, in Europe, the gods of Olympus slowly dwindled into village bogies;
so to-day, the theological Highlander sneaks from under the eye of the
Free Church divine to lay an offering by a sacred well.

I try to deal with the whole matter here because of a particular quality
in Paumotuan superstitions. It is true I heard them told by a man with a
genius for such narrations. Close about our evening lamp, within sound
of the island surf, we hung on his words, thrilling. The reader, in far
other scenes, must listen close for the faint echo.

This bundle of weird stories sprang from the burial and the woman's
selfish conjuration. I was dissatisfied with what I heard, harped upon
questions, and struck at last this vein of metal. It is from sundown to
about four in the morning that the kinsfolk camp upon the grave; and
these are the hours of the spirits' wanderings. At any time of the
night--it may be earlier, it may be later--a sound is to be heard below,
which is the noise of his liberation; at four sharp, another and louder
marks the instant of the re-imprisonment; between-whiles, he goes his
malignant rounds. "Did you ever see an evil spirit?" was once asked of a
Paumotuan. "Once." "Under what form?" "It was in the form of a crane."
"And how did you know that crane to be a spirit?" was asked. "I will
tell you," he answered; and this was the purport of his inconclusive
narrative. His father had been dead nearly a fortnight; others had
wearied of the watch; and as the sun was setting, he found himself by
the grave alone. It was not yet dark, rather the hour of the afterglow,
when he was aware of a snow-white crane upon the coral mound; presently
more cranes came, some white, some black; then the cranes vanished, and
he saw in their place a white cat, to which there was silently joined a
great company of cats of every hue conceivable; then these also
disappeared, and he was left astonished.

This was an anodyne appearance. Ta