ily beheld the grinning idols marshalled rank and file in
the Hoolah Hoolah ground, and was often in the habit of meeting those whom
I supposed to be the priests. But the temples seemed to be abandoned to
solitude; the festival had been nothing more than a jovial mingling of the
tribe; the idols were quite as harmless as any other logs of wood; and the
priests were the merriest dogs in the valley.

In fact, religious affairs in Typee were at a very low ebb. All such
matters sat very lightly upon the thoughtless inhabitants; and, in the
celebration of many of their strange rites, they appeared merely to seek a
sort of childish amusement.

A curious evidence of this was given in a remarkable ceremony, in which I
frequently saw Mehevi and several other chiefs and warriors of note take
part; but never a single female.

Among those whom I looked upon as forming the priesthood of the valley,
there was one in particular who often attracted my notice, and whom I
could not help regarding as the head of the order. He was a noble-looking
man, in the prime of his life, and of a most benignant aspect. The
authority this man, whose name was Kolory, seemed to exercise over the
rest, the episcopal part he took in the Feast of Calabashes, his sleek and
complacent appearance, the mystic characters which were tattooed upon his
chest, and, above all, the mitre he frequently wore, in the shape of a
towering head-dress, consisting of part of a cocoa-nut branch, the stalk
planted uprightly on his brow, and the leaflets gathered together and
passed round the temples and behind the ears, all these pointed him out as
Lord Primate of Typee. Kolory was a sort of Knight Templar--a
soldier-priest; for he often wore the dress of a Marquesan warrior, and
always carried a long spear, which, instead of terminating in a paddle at
the lower end, after the general fashion of these weapons, was curved into
a heathenish-looking little image. This instrument, however, might perhaps
have been emblematic of his double functions. With one end, in carnal
combat he tranfixed the enemies of his tribe; and with the other, as a
pastoral crook, he kept in order his spiritual flock. But this is not all
I have to about Kolory. His martial grace very often carried about with
him what seemed to me the half of a broken war-club. It was swathed round
with ragged bits of white tappa, and the upper part, which was intended to
represent a human head, was embellished with a st