ed baskets around some uncouth
jolly-looking image; I was present during the continuance of the
festival; I daily beheld the grinning idols marshalled rank and file in
the Hoolah Hoolah ground, and was often in the habit of meeting
those whom I supposed to be the priests. But the temples seemed to be
abandoned to solitude; the festival had been nothing more than a jovial
mingling of the tribe; the idols were quite harmless as any other logs
of wood; and the priests were the merriest dogs in the valley.

In fact religious affairs in Typee were at a very low ebb: all such
matters sat very lightly upon the thoughtless inhabitants; and, in the
celebration of many of their strange rites, they appeared merely to seek
a sort of childish amusement.

A curious evidence of this was given in a remarkable ceremony in which I
frequently saw Mehevi and several other chefs and warriors of note take
part; but never a single female.

Among those whom I looked upon as forming the priesthood of the valley,
there was one in particular who often attracted my notice, and whom
I could not help regarding as the head of the order. He was a noble
looking man, in the prime of his life, and of a most benignant aspect.
The authority this man, whose name was Kolory, seemed to exercise over
the rest, the episcopal part he took in the Feast of Calabashes, his
sleek and complacent appearance, the mystic characters which were
tattooed upon his chest, and above all the mitre he frequently wore,
in the shape of a towering head-dress, consisting of part of a cocoanut
branch, the stalk planted uprightly on his brow, and the leaflets
gathered together and passed round the temples and behind the ears, all
these pointed him out as Lord Primate of Typee. Kolory was a sort of
Knight Templar--a soldier-priest; for he often wore the dress of a
Marquesan warrior, and always carried a long spear, which, instead of
terminating in a paddle at the lower end, after the general fashion of
these weapons, was curved into a heathenish-looking little image. This
instrument, however, might perhaps have been emblematic of his double
functions. With one end in carnal combat he transfixed the enemies of
his tribe; and with the other as a pastoral crook he kept in order his
spiritual flock. But this is not all I have to say about Kolory.

His martial grace very often carried about with him what seemed to me
the half of a broken war-club. It was swathed round with ragged bits o