_ admiringly as he passed by, and the boys looked
up to him as a superior being whose noble deeds they thirsted to
emulate. Higher titles of honour still were bestowed on such as had
slain their ten, or twenty, or thirty; and Mr. Fison tells us of a chief
whose admiring countrymen had to compound all these titles into one in
order to set forth his superlative claims to glory. A man who had never
killed anybody was of very little account in this life, and he received
the penalty due to his sin in the life hereafter. For in the spirit land
the ghost of such a poor-spirited wretch was sentenced to what the
Fijians regarded as the most degrading of all punishments, to beat a
heap of muck with his bloodless club.[718]

[Sidenote: Ceremony of consecrating a manslayer. The temporary
restrictions laid on a manslayer were probably dictated by a fear of his
victim's ghost.]

The ceremony of consecrating a manslayer was elaborate. He was anointed
with red oil from the hair of his head to the soles of his feet; and
when he had been thus incarnadined he exchanged clubs with the
spectators, who believed that their weapons acquired a mysterious virtue
by passing through his holy hands. Afterwards the anointed one, attended
by the king and elders, solemnly stalked down to the sea and wetted the
soles of his feet in the water. Then the whole company returned to the
town, while the shell-trumpets sounded and the men raised a peculiar
hoot. Custom required that a hut should be built in which the anointed
man and his companions must pass the next three nights, during which the
hero might not lie down, but had to sleep as he sat; all that time he
might not change his bark-cloth garment, nor wash the red paint away
from his body, nor enter a house in which there was a woman.[719] The
reason for observing these curious restrictions is not mentioned, but in
the light of similar practices, some of which have been noticed in these
lectures,[720] we may conjecture that they were dictated by a fear of
the victim's ghost, who among savages generally haunts his slayer and
will do him a mischief, if he gets a chance. As it is especially in
dreams that the naturally incensed spirit finds his opportunity, we can
perhaps understand why the slayer might not lie down for the first three
nights after the slaughter; the wrath of the ghost would then be at its
hottest, and if he spied his murderer stretched in slumber on the
ground, the temptation to take a