ct, some chiefs could taboo almost anything they
liked, even a girl or a woman, or fruit and fish and animals and houses:
and after the chief had once said, 'It is taboo,' everybody else was
afraid to touch them. Of course, the fact that a chief or a landowner
has bought and paid for a particular privilege or species of taboo, or
has inherited it from his fathers, doesn't give him any better moral
claim to it. The question is, 'Is the claim in itself right and
reasonable?' For a wrong is only all the more a wrong for having been
long and persistently exercised. The Central Africans say, 'This is my
slave; I bought her and paid for her; I've a right, if I like, to kill
her and eat her.' The king of Ibo, on the West Coast, had a hereditary
right to offer up as a human sacrifice the first man he met every time
he quitted his palace; and he was quite surprised audacious freethinkers
should call the morality of his right in question. If you English were
all in a body to see through this queer land-taboo, now, which drives
your poor off the soil, and prevents you all from even walking at
liberty over the surface of the waste in your own country, you could
easily--"

"Oh, Lord, what shall we do!" Philip interposed in a voice of abject
terror. "If here isn't Sir Lionel!"

And sure enough, right across the narrow path in front of them stood a
short, fat, stumpy, unimpressive little man, with a very red face, and a
Norfolk jacket, boiling over with anger.

"What are you people doing here?" he cried, undeterred by the presence
of a lady, and speaking in the insolent, supercilious voice of the
English landlord in defence of his pheasant preserves. "This is private
property. You must have seen the notice at the gate, 'Trespassers will
be prosecuted.'"

"Yes, we did see it," Bertram answered, with his unruffled smile; "and
thinking it an uncalled-for piece of aggressive churlishness, both in
form and substance,--why, we took the liberty to disregard it."

Sir Lionel glared at him. In that servile neighbourhood, almost entirely
inhabited by the flunkeys of villadom, it was a complete novelty to him
to be thus bearded in his den. He gasped with anger. "Do you mean to
say," he gurgled out, growing purple to the neck, "you came in here
deliberately to disturb my pheasants, and then brazen it out to my face
like this, sir? Go back the way you came, or I'll call my keepers."

"No, I will NOT go back the way I came," Bertram responded