father's death
children are supposed not to possess a _ngai_ spirit; if a child dies
before its father, they think that it never had a _ngai_ spirit at all.
And the _ngai_ spirit may leave a man in his lifetime as well as at
death; for example, when a person faints, the natives think that he does
so because his _ngai_ spirit has departed from him, and they will stamp
on the ground to make it return. On the other hand the _choi_ spirit is
supposed never to quit a man during life; it is thought to be in some
undefined way related to the shadow, whereas the _ngai_ spirit, as we
saw, manifests itself in the beating of the heart. When a woman dies,
her _ngai_ spirit goes not into her children but into her sisters, one
after the other; and when all the sisters are dead, the woman's _ngai_
spirit goes away among the mangroves and perishes altogether.[164]

Thus these savages explain the phenomena of birth and death, of
conscious and unconscious life, by a theory of a double human spirit,
one associated with the heart and the other with the shadow. The
psychology is rudimentary, still it is interesting as an attempt to
solve problems which still puzzle civilised man.

[Sidenote: Beliefs of the natives of Cape Bedford in Queensland.]

Other Queensland aborigines associate the vital principle not with the
heart but with the breath. For example, at Cape Bedford the natives call
it _wau-wu_ and think that it never leaves the body sleeping or waking
till death, when it haunts its place of burial for a time and may
communicate with the living. Thus, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, it
will often appear to a near kinsman or intimate friend, tell him the
pitiful tale how he was done to death by an enemy, and urge him to
revenge. Again, the soul of a man's dead father or friend may bear him
company on a journey and, like the beryl-stone in Rossetti's poem _Rose
Mary_, warn him of an ambuscade lurking for him in a spot where the man
himself sees nothing. But the spirits of the dead do not always come
with such friendly intent; they may drive the living distracted; a
peculiar form of mental excitement and bewilderment is attributed to
their action. Further, these aborigines at Cape Bedford, in Queensland,
believe that all spirits of nature are in fact souls of the dead. Such
spirits usually leave their haunts in the forests and caves at night.
Stout-hearted old men can see and converse with them and receive from
them warnings of dang