e aged chief,
Tarra,[BO] maintained to one of the missionaries that the god of thunder
resided in his forehead; and Shungie and Okeda[BP] asserted that they
were possessed by gods of the sea.

The part of the heavens in which the gods reside is represented as
beautiful in the extreme. "When the clouds are beautifully chequered,"
writes Kendal, "the atua above, it is supposed, is planting sweet
potatoes. At the season when these are planted in the ground, the
planters dress themselves in their best raiment, and say that, as atuas
on earth, they are imitating the atua in heaven."

The New Zealanders believe that the souls of the higher orders among
them are immortal; but they hold that when the "cookees" die they perish
for ever. The spirit, they think, leaves the body the third day after
death, till which time it hovers round the corpse, and hears very well
whatever is said to it. But they hold also, it would seem, that there is
a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead person; the
left, as before-mentioned, ascending to heaven and becoming a star, and
the other, in the shape of a spirit, taking flight for the Reinga.
Reinga signifies, properly, the place of flight; and is said, in some
of the accounts, to be a rock or a mountain at the North Cape from
which, according to others, the spirits descend into the next world
through the sea. The notion which the New Zealanders really entertain as
to this matter appears to be that the spirits first leap from the North
Cape into the sea, and thence emerge into an Elysium situated in the
islands of the Three Kings. The submarine path to the blissful region of
the New Zealanders is less intricate than that of the Huron of
America:--

"To the country of the Dead,
Long and painful is thy way!
O'er rivers wide and deep
Lies the road that must be past,
By bridges narrow-wall'd,
When scarce the soul can force its way,
While the loose fabric totters under it."

In the heaven of the New Zealanders, as in that of the ancient Goths,
the chief employment of the blessed is war, their old delight while on
earth. The idea of any more tranquil happiness has no charms for them.
Speaking of an assembly of them which he had been endeavouring to
instruct in the doctrines of Christianity, one of the Wesleyan
missionaries says: "On telling them about the two eternal states, as
described in the Scriptures, an old chief began to protest against these
things