fact, but
how it builds up the image of this inveterate ghost-seer! He belongs to
the miserably poor island of Taenga, yet his father's house was always
well supplied. As Rua grew up he was called at last to go a-fishing with
this fortunate parent. They rowed into the lagoon at dusk, to an
unlikely place, and the boy lay down in the stern, and the father began
vainly to cast his line over the bows. It is to be supposed that Rua
slept; and when he awoke there was the figure of another beside his
father, and his father was pulling in the fish hand over hand. "Who is
that man, father?" Rua asked. "It is none of your business," said the
father; and Rua supposed the stranger had swum off to them from shore.
Night after night they fared into the lagoon, often to the most unlikely
places; night after night the stranger would suddenly be seen on board,
and as suddenly be missed; and morning after morning the canoe returned
laden with fish. "My father is a very lucky man," thought Rua. At last,
one fine day, there came first one boat party and then another who must
be entertained; father and son put off later than usual into the lagoon;
and before the canoe was landed it was four o'clock, and the morning
star was close on the horizon. Then the stranger appeared seized with
some distress; turned about, showing for the first time his face, which
was that of one long dead, with shining eyes; stared into the east, set
the tips of his fingers to his mouth like one a-cold, uttered a strange,
shuddering sound between a whistle and a moan--a thing to freeze the
blood; and, the daystar just rising from the sea, he suddenly was not.
Then Rua understood why his father prospered, why his fishes rotted
early in the day, and why some were always carried to the cemetery and
laid upon the graves. My informant is a man not certainly averse to
superstition, but he keeps his head, and takes a certain superior
interest, which I may be allowed to call scientific. The last point
reminding him of some parallel practice in Tahiti, he asked Rua if the
fish were left, or carried home again after a formal dedication. It
appears old Mariterangi practised both methods; sometimes treating his
shadowy partner to a mere oblation, sometimes honestly leaving his fish
to rot upon the grave.

It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and the
Polynesian _varua ino_ or _aitu o le vao_ is clearly the near kinsman of
the Transylvanian vampire. Her