pended by invisible cords,
head downward from the branches. It was the skeleton of a previous Korong
who had tried in vain to reach the bough, and perished. Tu-Kila-Kila had
made high feast on the victim's flesh; his bones, now collected together
and cunningly fastened with native rope, served at once as a warning and
as a trap or pitfall for all who might rashly venture to follow him.

Felix stood for one moment, alone and awe-struck, a solitary civilized
man, among those hideous surroundings. Above, the cold moon; all about,
the grim, stolid, half-hostile natives; close by, that strange,
serpentine, savage wife, guarding, cat-like, the sleep of her cannibal
husband; behind, the watchful Eyes of Tu-Kila-Kila, waiting ever in the
background, ready to raise a loud shout of alarm and warning the moment
the fatal branch was actually broken, but mute, by their vows, till that
moment was accomplished. Then a sudden wild impulse urged him on to the
attempt. The banyan had dropped down rooting offsets to the ground, after
the fashion of its kind, from its main branches. Felix seized one of
these and swung himself lightly up, till he reached the very limb on
which the sacred parasite itself was growing.

To get to the parasite, however, he must pass directly above
Tu-Kila-Kila's head, and over the point where that ghastly grinning
skeleton was suspended, as by an unseen hair, from the fork that bore it.

He walked along, balancing himself, and clutching, as he went, at the
neighboring boughs, while Tu-Kila-Kila, overcome with the kava, slept
stolidly and heavily on beneath him. At last he was almost within grasp
of the parasite. Could he lunge out and clutch it? One try--one effort!
No, no; he almost lost footing and fell over in the attempt. He couldn't
keep his balance so. He must try farther on. Come what might, he must go
past the skeleton.

The grisly mass swung again, clanking its bones as it swung, and groaned
in the wind ominously. The breeze whistled audibly through its hollow
skull and vacant eye-sockets. Tu-Kila-Kila turned uneasily in his sleep
below. Felix saw there was not one instant of time to be lost now. He
passed on boldly; and as he passed, a dozen thin cords of paper mulberry,
stretched every way in an invisible network among the boughs, too small
to be seen in the dim moonlight, caught him with their toils and almost
overthrew him. They broke with his weight, and Felix himself, tumbling
blindly, fell fo