cordingly they sent him
presents of pigs and other provisions, which he shared among the people.
Then the tabooed persons went into a stream and washed themselves; after
that they caught some animal, such as a pig or a turtle, and wiped their
hands on it, and the animal thereupon became sacred to the chief. Thus
the taboo was removed, and the men were free once more to work, to feed
themselves, and to live with their wives. Lazy and idle fellows
willingly undertook the duty of waiting on the dead, as it relieved them
for some time from the painful necessity of earning their own
bread.[722] The reason why such persons might not touch food with their
hands was probably a fear of the ghost or at all events of the infection
of death; the ghost or the infection might be clinging to their hands
and might so be transferred from them to their food with fatal effects.
In Great Fiji not every one might dig a chief's grave. The office was
hereditary in a certain clan. After the funeral the grave-digger was
shut up in a house and painted black from head to foot. When he had to
make a short excursion, he covered himself with a large mantle of
painted native cloth and was supposed to be invisible. His food was
brought to the house after dark by silent bearers, who placed it just
within the doorway. His seclusion might last for a long time;[723] it
was probably intended to screen him from the ghost.

[Sidenote: Hair cropped and finger-joints cut off in mourning.]

The usual outward sign of mourning was to crop the hair or beard, or
very rarely both. Some people merely made bald the crown of the head.
Indeed the Fijians were too vain of their hair to part with it lightly,
and to conceal the loss which custom demanded of them on these occasions
they used to wear wigs, some of which were very skilfully made. The
practice of cutting off finger-joints in mourning has already been
mentioned; one early authority affirms and another denies that joints of
the little toes were similarly amputated by the living as a mark of
sorrow for the dead. So common was the practice of lopping off the
little fingers in mourning that till recently few of the older natives
could be found who had their hands intact; most of them indeed had lost
the little fingers of both hands. There was a Fijian saying that the
fourth finger "cried itself hoarse in vain for its absent mate"
(_droga-droga-wale_). The mutilation was usually confined to the
relations of the dec