ask, and the natives believing so thoroughly in
them, they have the power of upsetting all arrangements and causing
serious trouble. This morning, I found our spirit friend to be a man who
sat in our house all day yesterday, a stranger from an inland village. He
has quite a different look from the other natives--an anxious, melancholy
expression. While at morning coffee, he came and sat down alongside of
us all right, and we learned from him that the spirit of a deceased
friend comes into him, and then things are revealed, the spirit speaking
through him. He says, when we were at Eikiri, a few weeks ago, he knew
it, and told the people of his village of it.

The wallaby-hunters are to come in this afternoon with great supplies.
When sitting round the fire with our old chief, we asked him if he knew
of any tailed folks about inland. "Oh dear, yes." And then he gave us a
perfect and laughable description of what must be some creature of the
monkey tribe. It climbs, laughs, and talks a peculiar language of its
own; it scratches the head, slaps the thigh, and sits down to eat like a
man. I then said, "But they are not really men?" "Well, not exactly,
but very near it; they are hairy all over, and some are perfectly black."
The tail, according to his description, must be about a fathom long. We
are to see them, and must, he says, secure one or two, dead or alive. Our
spirit is out in his prognostications, the wallaby-hunters have not
returned, and we cannot leave to-morrow.

21_st_.--Our spirit friend is quite out as yet, for here we are nursing
Patience, and trying to make her a dear friend. We are promised a start
to-morrow. In the evening, the hunters came in with large supplies of
wallaby. They report innumerable horses and foreigners as having gone to
Kupele; we suppose it to be Goldie's party. From to-day's shooting, the
old man got a green parrot, and devoured it raw. Oriope dressed himself
in his fighting gear, and went through a few antics; he looked a perfect
fiend. He is very proud of a stone club he possesses with a piece broken
off; he says it was broken in felling a tremendous fellow in a
neighbouring village. He killed him. "What, stand before me!"

22_nd_.--I was eating a banana this morning, when I was told not to throw
the skin away, but hand it to them, which I did, when it was passed round
and kissed by all with short ejaculations. I asked what it meant, and
was told it was their man