e is a tale in which the kinship appears
broadly marked. On the atoll of Penrhyn, then still partly savage, a
certain chief was long the salutary terror of the natives. He died, he
was buried; and his late neighbours had scarce tasted the delights of
licence ere his ghost appeared about the village. Fear seized upon all;
a council was held of the chief men and sorcerers; and with the approval
of the Rarotongan missionary, who was as frightened as the rest, and in
the presence of several whites--my friend Mr. Ben Hird being one--the
grave was opened, deepened until water came, and the body re-interred
face down. The still recent staking of suicides in England and the
decapitation of vampires in the east of Europe form close parallels.

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late
war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were
brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why)
was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death.
When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and
chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoanuu, where the struggle was long
centred and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came
carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place
of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground;
and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If
any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third
coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried
home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested. The rite was
practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the soul was its
object: its motive, reverent affection. The present king disowns indeed
all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied
were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country
of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful. And this severely classic opinion
doubtless represents the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my
Lafaele marks the grosser terrors of the ignorant.

This belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites perhaps explains
a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all to share our
European horror of human bones and mummies. Of the first they made their
cherished ornaments; they preserved them in houses or in mortuary caves;
and the watchers of royal sepulc