ic who happened to assist at this spiritual sitting, had
the temerity to hold on tight to the proffered hand of the ghost, while
another infidel assisted him to obtain a sight as well as a touch of the
vanished hand by striking a light. It then turned out that the supposed
apparition was no spirit but the medium Mea herself. She was brought
before a magistrate, who sentenced her to a short term of imprisonment
and relieved her of the property which she had amassed by the exercise
of her spiritual talents.[318] It is hardly for us, or at least for some
of us, to cast stones at the efforts of ignorant savages to communicate
by means of such intermediaries with their departed friends. Similar
attempts have been made in our own country within our lifetime, and I
believe that they are still being made, in perfect good faith, by
educated ladies and gentlemen, who like their black brethren and sisters
in the faith are sometimes made the dupes of designing knaves. If New
Guinea has its Meas, Europe has its Eusapias. Human credulity and vulgar
imposture are much the same all the world over.

[Sidenote: Fear of the dead.]

The fear of the dead is strongly marked in some funeral customs which
are observed by the Roro-speaking tribes who occupy a territory at the
mouth of the St. Joseph river in British New Guinea.[319] When a death
takes place, the female relations of the deceased lacerate their skulls,
faces, breasts, bellies, arms, and legs with sharp shells, till they
stream with blood and fall down exhausted. Moreover, a fire is kindled
on the grave and kept up almost continually for months for the purpose,
we are told, of warming the ghost.[320] These attentions might be
interpreted as marks of affection rather than of fear; but in other
customs of these people the dread of the ghost is unmistakable. For when
the corpse has been placed in the grave a near kinsman strokes it twice
with a branch from head to foot in order to drive away the dead man's
spirit; and in Yule Island, when the ghost has thus been brushed away
from the body, he is pursued by two men brandishing sticks and torches
from the village to the edge of the forest, where with a last curse they
hurl the sticks and torches after him.[321]

[Sidenote: Ghost of dead wife feared by widower.]

Among these people the visits of ghosts, though frequent, are far from
welcome, for all ghosts are supposed to be mischievous and to take no
delight but in injuring the livi