y kept in
chests. These they used to show with much exultation to the strangers
who visited their country; boasting that neither they nor their
ancestors had ever been known to dispose of such honourable heirlooms
for any price that could be offered.

Among some races it has been the custom to preserve only the scalp; as,
for instance, among the Indians of America. The taking of scalps,
however, is also a practice of great antiquity. The Scythians used to
hang the scalps of their enemies to the harness of their horses; and he
was deemed the most distinguished warrior whose equipage was most
plentifully decorated with these ornaments. Some were accustomed to sew
numbers of scalps together, so as to form a cloak, in which they arrayed
themselves. It was also usual for the warriors of this nation to tear
off the skin from the right hands of their slain enemies, and to
preserve it with the nails attached; and sometimes they flayed the whole
body, and, after drying the skin, made use of it as a covering for their
horses.

Some of the savage tribes of America are said to have been accustomed to
practice the same barbarity, and to convert the skins of the hands into
pouches for holding their tobacco.

The history of Scotland affords an instance, even in comparatively
recent times, of a victorious party, in the bitterness of their
contempt and hatred, employing the skin of a slain enemy in a somewhat
similar manner. Hugh Cressingham, appointed by Edward I. Lord Chief
Justice of Scotland, having been slain at Stirling Bridge in an attack
by Wallace, the Scots flayed him, and made saddles and girths of his
skin.

To recur to the practices of a higher state of civilization, our own
custom, which existed as late as the last century, of exposing the heads
of traitors, although meant as a warning, in the same way as hanging in
chains, was perhaps a relic of those ferocious ages when it was not
considered mean and brutal to carry revenge beyond the grave. The
executions in London, after the rebellion of 1745, were followed by such
a revolting display, useless for any object of salutary terror, and
calculated only to excite a vulgar curiosity. Horace Walpole, in a very
few words, describes the feelings with which the public crowded to this
sight:--"I have been this morning at the Tower, and passed under the new
heads of Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spying glasses
at a halfpenny a look."

The New Zealanders ha