him. I said he was a fool to throw himself away
for fear of being laughed at; and asked him what or who his private god
was, knowing it to be no use talking to him about Providence, a thing he
had never heard of. He said his god was a shark, and that if he were
cast away in a canoe and was obliged to swim, the sharks would not bite
him. I asked him if he believed the shark, his god, had any power to act
over him? He said yes. 'Well then,' said I, 'why do you not live a
little longer, and trust to your god to give you an appetite?' Finding
that he could not give me satisfactory answers, and being determined to
get buried to avoid the jeers of the ladies, which to a Feejeean are
intolerable, he told me I knew nothing about it, and that I must not
compare him to a white man, who was generally insensible to all shame,
and did not care how much he was laughed at. I called him a fool, and
said the best thing he could do was to get buried out of the way,
because I knew that most of them work by the rules of contrary; but it
was all to no purpose. By this time all his relations had collected
round the door. His father had a kind of wooden spade to dig the grave
with, his mother a new suit of _tapa_ [bark-cloth], his sister some
vermilion and a whale's tooth, as an introduction to the great god of
Rage-Rage. He arose, took up his bed and walked, not for life, but for
death, his father, mother, and sister following after, with several
other distant relations, whom I accompanied. I noticed that they seemed
to follow him something in the same way that they follow a corpse in
Europe to the grave (that is, as far as relationship and acquaintance
are concerned), but, instead of lamenting, they were, if not rejoicing,
acting and chatting in a very unconcerned way. At last we reached a
place where several graves could be seen, and a spot was soon selected
by the man who was to be buried. The old man, his father, began digging
his grave, while his mother assisted her son in putting on a new _tapa_
[bark-cloth], and the girl (his sister) was besmearing him with
vermilion and lamp-black, so as to send him decent into the invisible
world, he (the victim) delivering messages that were to be taken by his
sister to people then absent. His father then announced to him and the
rest that the grave was completed, and asked him, in rather a surly
tone, if he was not ready by this time. The mother then _nosed_ him, and
likewise the sister. He said, '