hres dwelt with their children among the
bones of generations. The mummy, even in the making, was as little
feared. In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was made by the
household with continual unction and exposure to the sun; in the
Carolines, upon the farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the
family hearth. Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in
Samoa. And not ten years ago, in the Gilberts, the widow must disinter,
cleanse, polish, and thenceforth carry about her, by day and night, the
head of her dead husband. In all these cases we may suppose the process,
whether of cleansing or drying, to have fully exorcised the aitu.

But the Paumotuan belief is more obscure. Here the man is duly buried,
and he has to be watched. He is duly watched, and the spirit goes abroad
in spite of watches. Indeed, it is not the purpose of the vigils to
prevent these wanderings; only to mollify by polite attention the
inveterate malignity of the dead. Neglect (it is supposed) may irritate
and thus invite his visits, and the aged and weakly sometimes balance
risks and stay at home. Observe, it is the dead man's kindred and next
friends who thus deprecate his fury with nocturnal watchings. Even the
placatory vigil is held perilous, except in company, and a boy was
pointed out to me in Rotoava, because he had watched alone by his own
father. Not the ties of the dead, nor yet their proved character, affect
the issue. A late Resident, who died in Fakarava of sunstroke, was
beloved in life and is still remembered with affection; none the less
his spirit went about the island clothed with terrors, and the
neighbourhood of Government House was still avoided after dark. We may
sum up the cheerful doctrine thus: All men become vampires, and the
vampire spares none. And here we come face to face with a tempting
inconsistency. For the whistling spirits are notoriously clannish; I
understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk only, and that
the medium was always of the race of the communicating spirit. Here,
then, we have the bonds of the family, on the one hand, severed at the
hour of death; on the other, helpfully persisting.

The child's soul in the Tahitian tale was wrapped in leaves. It is the
spirits of the newly dead that are the dainty. When they are slain, the
house is stained with blood. Rua's dead fisherman was decomposed;
so--and horribly--was his arboreal demon. The spirit, then, is a thing
mate